The Trump-brigade is busy trying to reconstruct history so that their favorite gasbag doesn’t look as titanically stupid as he evidently is. It is to be expected that when your favorite gasbag is directly responsible for 80,000+ excess deaths, there is naturally an urge to distract and explain it all away, especially if you can make this moron look like a stable genius in the effort. As a result, rational people are being gaslighted by a deluge of untenable claims about Trump’s untenable claims. One such is “The blatant lie about what he said boggles my mind; nowhere did he say “drink or inject bleach.” Let’s deal with that one, first. Here’s what was actually said:
ACTING UNDERSECRETARY BRYAN: “We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids. And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing — just spraying it on and letting it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva.
This is not the end of our work as we continue to characterize this virus and integrate our findings into practical applications to mitigate exposure and transmission.”
[NOT 10 SECONDS LATER--]
DONALD J. TRUMP; SUPER STABLE GENIUS: ”Thank you very much. So I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. It sounds interesting...
And then I see the disinfectant, where it 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 in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.”
It should really be self-evident that, yes, Donald Trump suggested injecting a disinfectant such as bleach, isopropyl alcohol or other surface disinfectants.
Mischaracterizing criticism of that as saying that critics are saying Trump suggested the glaringly obvious error of drinking bleach is disingenuous. Although, there is also a fairly strong suggestion to be made that America’s favorite president probably got the idea of getting bleach inside the body from corresponding with total dumbasses who think drinking bleach is a great idea.
But the retroactive effort to make Trump look like a genius gets even better than simply loudly asserting that people are saying something they didn’t say while whining about people saying that someone said something you don’t think they said. We also get some real, honest-to-goodness, basement-dwelling homegrown medical expertise like this-- “President asked about light and disinfectant injected into the body. There are two existing therapies. UV therapy as well as ozone therapy. The one that has the left all riled up is ozone therapy. This has been used for cancer patients. O3 gas is infused into the body as a DISINFECTANT to improve the intake of oxygen while ramping up the immune system, thus more efficiently killing bacteria and viruses. You can google it if you want.”
OK. Setting aside, for a moment, the facts that Trump didn’t “ask” anything and was quite obviously referring to Bryan’s immediately preceding statement where he was discussing SURFACE DISINFECTANTS, let’s take a few minutes to “google” ozone therapy.
Here’s what the FDA has to say about it: “Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy.”
The FDA prohibits the use of ozone therapy.
Here’s what Quackwatch had to say about it: “In 1993 testimony before Senator Harkin’s Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Ed McCabe, a promoter of ozone, stated, ‘644 German ozone therapists successfully treated 384,775 patients with 5,579,238 doses of ozone with no ill effects. Thousands of published medical papers contain proof of ozones effectiveness in vivo. Numerous US physicians have converted hundreds of AIDS patients from HIV sero-positive to HIV sero-negative status using ozone. Help is available to AIDS patients right now but the medical establishment is ignoring it.’ [31] No evidence for the claims exist in reliable scientific literature.”
“Oxygenation therapists proposed that disease is caused by absence of oxygen and loss of cellular ability to use oxygen for ‘good energy’ metabolism, detoxification, and immune system function. Oxygen therapies are proposed in order to restore the body’s ability to produce ‘good’ energy, to ‘detoxify’ metabolic poisons, and to kill invading organisms. However, over the five decades that have passed since this concept was proposed, scientists have shown that...Ozone-treated blood infused during autohemotherapy does not kill AIDS virus in vivo.”
Here’s what the American Cancer Society had to say about it: “Oxygen therapy introduces substances into the body that are supposed to release oxygen. The extra oxygen is believed to increase the body's ability to destroy disease-causing cells. Two of the most common compounds used in oxygen therapy are hydrogen peroxide and ozone—a chemically active form of oxygen. This type of treatment is different from the common medical uses of oxygen, which involve increasing the amount of oxygen gas in inhaled air. It is also different from hyperbaric oxygen, which involves the use of pressurized oxygen gas (see our document on Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy).”
“Available scientific evidence does not support claims that increasing oxygen levels in the body will harm or kill cancer cells...A 2001 review of ozone therapy concluded that ‘… few rigorous clinical trials of the treatment exist. Those that have been published demonstrated no evidence of effect’… Until more positive evidence emerges, ozone therapy should be avoided."
Weird, it’s like people who are trying to claim Trump was merely referring to “accepted” medical treatments don’t actually know what they’re talking about, or at the very least don’t realize that what they’re referring to as medicine is pseudoscience.
But the takeaway, here, is that if you pay attention to context, Trump is an idiot who thought it might be a good idea to inject bleach. And if you don’t, a rational person would STILL come to the conclusion that Trump is an idiot because he was promoting pseudoscience.
The same titanic jackass who tried to excuse Trump on the basis that ozone is a “cancer therapy” also tried to justify “injecting disinfectant” on the basis of an argument that “if you take high amounts of vitamin C... you will wind up with a buildup of hydrogen peroxide inside the body. Hydrogen peroxide is a DISINFECTANT.”
Ok, genius. Let’s scope that one out, too--there is some VERY limited evidence that injecting high doses of vitamin C into the bloodstream can reduce or kill cancer cells. How does that work? Vitamin C does indeed convert to hydrogen peroxide. But the channel of efficacy has nothing to do with the fact that hydrogen peroxide is a “disinfectant”; rather, it has to do with the fact that hydrogen peroxide is toxic to ALL cells, and tumor cells with low levels of catalase enzyme activity are much less capable of removing hydrogen peroxide than normal cells. Mind you, this is based on very limited clinical studies, but in concept it isn’t terribly different from other forms of chemo: a substance toxic to normal cells happens to be slightly more toxic to tumor cells. It has nothing to do with hydrogen peroxide being a disinfectant, and even the production of hydrogen peroxide is a step removed from the injection of vitamin C, itself having nothing whatsoever to do with what Trump was talking about. So, again, we have to engage in quite a bit of mental gymnastics to get where these morons want us to go. I have had a friend suggest that they wouldn’t belittle someone for coming up with the idea of injecting disinfectant if we were in a brainstorming session with folks trying to think outside the box and come up with ideas. Hey, I’d probably try to refrain from belittling that person, too, if my objective were to throw everything against the wall for further evaluation to see what might stick. That said, I wouldn’t hesitate to reject as a good idea any suggestion that we inject disinfectants, and I wouldn’t be inclined to take a fallacy of equivocation on the word “disinfectant” as an indication that they’re all equally deserving of a respectful trial.
But even beyond that, I would NOT HAVE that “brainstorming session” during a press conference, and I SURE AS SHIT would not have that “brainstorming session” during a briefing to the nation on the national response to a pandemic.
And that’s without even taking into consideration why I would EVER have someone in such a brainstorming session who has absolutely NO expertise on the topic, at all, and who has already shown himself to barely understand well enough how the real world works to even CONSULT on such questions.
A rational president ought to be able to rely on medical professionals to provide enough information for him to make important calls and secure enough to realize that he isn’t COMPETING with them. It shouldn’t have ever been about Trump trying to make himself look smart, but it always boils down to his fragile ego. And that fragile ego apparently always makes him make the wrong decision. And now, sadly, about 80,000 Americans have paid the ultimate price simply because this thin-skinned narcissist hated Obama so much that Trump was willing to sacrifice the country’s ability to spot, test for, isolate, and deal with a pandemic just to undo anything Obama might have put into place. If that doesn’t deserve belittling and condemnation, then nothing does.
Finally, just to round up this mess, these same yahoos who are desperately trying to rescue the President’s reputation are learning, as has anyone who has ever worked for him, that he will not hesitate to throw them under the bus. Yes, there’s the fact that he is LITERALLY putting their lives at risk, but relative to his asinine assertion that we should inject disinfectant, even as they were scouring the internet for pseudoscience that might make that stupid suggestion seem slightly more reasonable, Trump retreated to the “just kidding” defense.
That’s right, now he is pretending that he only suggested injecting disinfectant “sarcastically” to see what would happen. You’re supposed to ignore the evidence of your own eyes and ears, the readily available transcript, and everything you consciously or subconsciously know about human communication to take the Liar-in-Chief at his “word” that, even though he lied to you every other time, this time he’s telling the truth when he says he’s not as dumb as he looked.
But the simple fact is that he is EVERY BIT as dumb as he looks, every bit as dumb as his former employees say he is, and every bit as dumb as you could expect someone to be who grew up with enormous wealth & privilege and little exposure to the real world.
When push comes to shove, this clown is getting people killed every single day, and it stopped being funny with the first body bag.
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