The ‘Daily Trump Show’ is now airing truly dangerous ideas, cancel the show now (updated)

The cable news networks have demonstrated reckless and irresponsible judgment in airing live the Coronavirus Task Force daily briefings that Donald Trump has hijacked for the “Daily Trump Show,” a substitute for his Nuremberg-style MAGA cult rallies.

It’s bad enough that the cable news networks allowed “Dr. Trump, snake oil salesman” to sell his miracle cure elixir which, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be toxic and deadly and killed Americans before the coronavirus could. Dr. Trump’s miracle cure ‘showed no benefit’ in recent medical studies.

On Thursday, the “Daily Trump Show” crossed into truly dangerous territory that no responsible news network should ever have allowed to air live.

Dr. Trump, snake oil salesman, actually said this in all seriousness:

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

I’m sorry, but that’s it. Pull the plug now before this snake oil salesman can kill any more Americans with his poisonous elixirs for what ails them. Trump should be arrested for endangering the public health.

The Washington Post reports, Trump’s medical musings are getting louder as coronavirus infects his presidency (excerpts):

President Trump yesterday touted the bizarre idea disinfectant could somehow be applied to or ingested by humans to rid them of the novel coronavirus. Or that ultraviolet light or sunlight could be “brought inside the body” to help people with covid-19.

The president’s unsubstantiated — and potentially dangerous — amateur musings came after William N. Bryan, the acting undersecretary for science and technology at the Homeland Security Department, announced an “emerging result” from a lab study showing direct sunlight helps kill the coronavirus.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Nope, nope, nope: On Friday, the maker of Lysol and Dettol released a statement urging people not to ingest their product.

“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),” the Reckitt Benckiser Group emailed The Washington Post. “With all products, our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines. Please read the label and safety information.”

Do not try this at home: A researcher as well as a medical and radiation oncologist, Hahn stressed no one should take matters into their own hands without consulting their doctor. And, stating the obvious, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn confirmed,“I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant.”

“My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told our colleagues Allyson Chiu and Katie Shepherd. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.”

Trump has repeatedly advanced unproven medical remedies from the White House podium as the coronavirus pandemic becomes the central challenge of his presidency — and as nearly 50,000 Americans have died of the disease.

His latest medical “suggestion,” as Trump called it, comes in the wake of a fresh Veterans Affairs study on his previously favorite remedy — hydroxychloroquine — found the anti-malarial drug to have no benefit in treating covid-19. The study instead found the drug was linked to higher death rates for hospitalized VA patients with the virus. Other clinical trials to gauge the drug’s impact are ongoing.

“An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone,” wrote the authors. “These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.”

Up until this week, however, Trump was  publicly betting on the controversial drug as a cure-all. Our colleagues Phil Rucker, Bob Costa, Laurie McGinley and Josh Dawsey reported friends like personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Fox host Laura Ingraham were lobbying the president on the drug’s efficiacy.

Arrest this pair of assclowns for endangering the public as well.

The daily briefing as a traveling medicine show showcased Trump’s desire to find a cure-all for a disease has caused confusion and turmoil within his administration’s health agencies:

• • • Rick Bright, who was ousted as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority earlier this week, yesterday filed a whistleblower complaint. Bright alleges that he was removed after resisting the Trump administration’s push for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.
    • “I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” Bright said, per our colleague Yasmeen Abutaleb. “I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”
    • “Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis,” Bright said in a statement first reported by the New York Times’s Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman.
    • Trump insisted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield would retract his statement to our colleague Lena H. Sun that a second virus wave could be “more difficult.” Instead, at the podium Wednesday, Redfield confirmed he was “accurately quoted in The Washington Post,” contradicting Trump’s claims. 

See also Trump’s Scientists Push Back on His Claim That Virus May Not Return This Fall:

When pressed by reporters, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, did not directly support the president’s assertion. But Dr. Fauci, another leading scientific voice for the administration, supported Dr. Redfield’s assertion that the virus would be here in the fall.

“What Dr. Redfield was saying, first of all, is that we will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that,” he said, adding: “It’s going to be complicated. So whether or not it’s going to be big or small is going to depend on our response.”

The Post continues:

The New York Times’s Katie Rogers and Annie Karni report Trump usually doesn’t prepare for sometimes marathon briefings where he dispenses medical advice: “Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live. He hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes,” Rogers and Karni report.

More from The Post: Trump asked if disinfectants could be injected to kill the coronavirus inside the body. Doctors answered: ‘People will die.’

The question, which Trump offered unprompted, immediately spurred doctors to respond with incredulity and warnings against injecting or otherwise ingesting disinfectants, which are highly toxic.

My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told The Washington Post. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.”

Trump’s eyebrow-raising query came immediately after William N. Bryan, the acting undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, gave a presentation on the potential impact of summer heat and humidity, which also included references to tests that showed the effectiveness of different types of disinfectants. He recounted data from recent tests that showed how bleach, alcohol and sunlight could kill the coronavirus on surfaces.

Bryan said bleach killed the virus in about five minutes and isopropyl alcohol killed it in 30 seconds. In tests, sunlight and high temperatures also appeared to shorten the virus’s life on surfaces and in the air, Bryan said.

Trump has previously claimed that the arrival of summer weather will help fight the coronavirus outbreak without resorting to measures that carry significant economic ramifications. The study Bryan presented Thursday appeared to support those claims to some degree, although its results have not been peer-reviewed.

Note: The president has on multiple occasions suggested that the pandemic would ease off in the summer, despite research showing otherwise. Cases have also continued to explode in countries with equatorial climates and those in the Southern Hemisphere, which is currently in the middle of autumn. Summer Heat May Not Diminish Coronavirus Strength: the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in a public report sent to the White House, has said, in effect: the country should not rely on warm weather to stop contagion. “The pandemic may lessen because of social distancing and other measures, but the evidence so far does not inspire confidence in the benefits of sun and humidity.”

Other doctors stepped forward after the briefing to challenge the president, calling his comments “irresponsible,” “extremely dangerous” and “frightening” in interviews with The Post as they rushed to warn people of the dire consequences of ingesting caustic chemicals.

“We’ve heard the president trying to practice medicine for several weeks now, but this is a new low that is outside the realms of common sense or plausibility,” said Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and emergency physician at University Hospitals in Cleveland.

“I can understand looking to medicines that might have some effect or some sort of studies in a petri dish showing that they might work on a virus,” Marino added. “But talking about putting ultraviolet radiation inside of the human body or putting antiseptic things that are toxic to life inside of living people, it doesn’t make any sense anymore.”

And not only were Trump’s statements baffling, doctors told The Post that his remarks could pose risks to the lives of those who interpret the words as a suggestion to try the unproven treatments themselves.

“People will do extraordinary things if you give them the idea,” said Dara Kass, associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.

Like the Arizona couple in their 60s who ingested a fish tank cleaner containing chloroquine phosphate, killing the husband and hospitalizing the wife. NBC reported that “The woman said they took it as a preventative measure after hearing Trump and others talk about it on TV, and implored people to not “believe anything that the president says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about. And don’t take anything — be so careful and call your doctor. This is a heart ache I’ll never get over.”

Trump’s Thursday musings have the potential to cause even greater harm, Kass said to The Post.

“The difference between this and the chloroquine is that somebody could go right away to their pantry and start swallowing bleach. They could go to their medicine cabinet and swallow isopropyl alcohol,” Kass said. “A lot of people have that in their homes. There’s an immediate opportunity to react.”

People who ingest such chemicals often die, Kass said. Those who survive usually end up with feeding tubes, a result of their mouth and esophagus being eroded by the cleaning agents.

“It’s horrific,” she said.

By late Thursday, social media was flooded with pointed warnings from doctors, begging people not to attempt self-medication amid the pandemic.

* * *

Meanwhile, other experts also sought to fact-check Trump’s claims about light as a possible treatment.

“No, you cannot inject UV light into your body to cure #COVID19 — neither biology or physics work that way,” tweeted science writer David Robert Grimes, who noted that he earned his PhD in medical ultraviolet radiation.

Still, despite the prolific warnings, doctors told The Post not everyone is going to listen.

“There is an emergency department in America in the week that will probably get a bleach ingestion because of this,” Kass said. “We know that because people are scared and vulnerable, and they’re not going to think it’s that dangerous because they can get it in their house.”

So what’s next, is “Dear Leader” Donald Trump going to go all Jim Jones on us and tell his MAGA cult followers to “just drink the bleach or huff the Lysol, it will protect you from COVID-19”? Is the media going to allow this sociopath to go this far live on air before they finally stop this dangerous shitshow?

The “Daily Trump Show” must end now, or the cable networks should lose their broadcast licenses and go dark.

UPDATE: A new ad entitled “Unfit” by Republicans for the Rule of Law savages Donald Trump for pushing injecting oneself with Clorox into one’s veins as a treatment for the novel coronavirus. Enjoy!