There is a lot to unpack this week.
Who would have thought the President of the United States of America, a person in a position that arguably demands a high degree of intelligence regardless of who is in office, would casually talk about injecting disinfectants as a possible means of treating and curing COVID-19.
First and foremost, DO NOT inject or consume disinfectant as a possible means of curing COVID-19. Never thought I’d have to write that sentence. I could go on and on about how irresponsible it is to try this and I thought it was safe to assume we, as a society, were at a point where doing something like this is universally believed to be a bad idea.
I don’t have a medical degree, I have a communications degree from the University of Wyoming. Regardless, I feel comfortable telling people they shouldn’t remotely consider injecting or consuming a disinfectant because I know that at very least, it would result in a call to the Poison Control Center.
I assume this information falls under the same categories as “sky is blue” and “water is wet.”
Yet, here we are and public relations people who likely make a lot of money have issued statements advising against using disinfectants outside of their intended purposes.
“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” a spokesperson for Reckitt Benckiser, the company which owns the Lysol brand said in a statement to NBC News.
President Donald Trump has since said he was being sarcastic and the White House has accused the media of taking his comments out of context.
“I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he said Friday.
Which, OK? Taking his statement of being sarcastic at face value, he should have had the professionalism to recognize making a sarcastic comment during a press conference about a global pandemic wasn’t a great idea.
However, he hasn’t shown that ability in the last three years of his presidency and even his mantra of “me good, press bad” seems to be wearing thin.
Given he’s made similarly dubious claims about a wide variety of topics, I think a lot of people have gotten to a point where they don’t pay attention to much of what he says.
My personal theory is he’s attempting to be that one person in a movie who comes up with the surprisingly overlooked and simple solution to the threat. Think Jeff Goldbloom’s character in “Independence Day” when he gets the idea to infect the invader’s computers with a virus after hearing his father say something about being sick or, for a more dated reference, in the 1951 science fiction film “The Thing From Another World,” the soldiers stuck in a remote Alaskan base trying to survive an alien menace with a physiology similar to a plant can’t figure out how to kill it -- until the secretary stationed at the base starts talking about methods of cooking vegetables.
We are in some unprecedented times and I’m not just referring to the pandemic. If there’s one takeaway from this rant, it would be that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see what’s satire and what’s real.
Case in point: The Onion, a satirical news website, published an article titled “Man Just Buying One Of Every Cleaning Product In Case Trump Announces It’s Coronavirus Cure.” It was published March 25. Oddly enough, the article has a dateline indicating it takes place in Evanston, Wyo.
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