Throughout the recent months that the pandemic of COVID-19 has come to light in our country, President Donald Trump has had a lot of things to say about it.

One of the false claims that has brought a lot of attention to the public eye was an eccentric idea from Trump regarding a disinfectant injection. On April 23, at a press briefing in the White House, President Trump deliberated about the possibility of using and injecting disinfectant into the human body to kill the coronavirus. 

 “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,” he said, while turning to the White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, who simply held her head down. 

Illinois officials have also said they experienced a significant increase in calls to poison control following the President’s statement. An Illinois Public Health Director, Dr. Ngozi Ezike said the calls have included someone using a detergent-based solution for a sinus rinse and another person gargling with a bleach and mouthwash mixture to kill the virus. The comments that Trump made on the outbreak has been taking a big toll on many Americans. 

A day later at a bill signing, when asked about the injection comments by a reporter, President Trump articulated that he was not serious and that it was meant to be a sarcastic question. He stated, “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen.” Injecting yourself with a disinfectant to cure yourself from a deadly virus is way more beyond imaginable, but there’s still hope at the end of every storm. 

Another peculiar claim that caught the attention of many was a comment made by President Trump at the same press briefing. It was an idea of using ultraviolet light inside the body to help fight off COVID-19. Trump first spoke about the possibility of using this type of light as a treatment for people who already have been exposed to the virus. This was a suggestion that doctors actually called dangerous and unsafe. 

Donald Trump said that he asked William Bryan, a science and technology adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, to explore those possibilities. He also had said that Bryan told him he would follow up. Bryan presented “emerging” results from recent federal government studies showing that sunlight, heat, and humidity could help kill the coronavirus on external surfaces.

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous force, 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,” Trump said Thursday. There is some evidence that, in general, the virus on surfaces dies more quickly when exposed directly to sunlight, but we don’t exactly know how much or how long it has to be exposed for UV light to have an effect on it. This misleading claim was also to be said as a sarcastic comment according to Trump. There have been a lot of different opinions on the remarks our President has said over these few weeks. The comments he has made so far are strange and it definitely makes us think about the new normality we are living. 

After hearing about Trump’s bizarre remarks, Lysol has taken action and updated their website with a notice of how to safely and properly use their products. According to their website, “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 multitude of people agree with what the Reckitt Benckiser company had to say in regard to Trump’s sayings. 

Ultimately, in the first few days of March, President Trump was interviewed on Fox News in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He talked about the date that the coronavirus started to take a toll on the United States. “We got hit with the virus, really, three weeks ago, if you think about it, I guess. That’s when we first started, really, to see, you know, some possible effects,” he postulated this on March  5. In reality, data showed that the U.S. had its first confirmed coronavirus case on Jan. 21, which was a little over more than six weeks before Trump was interviewed. So, what President Trump had said was claimed to be false. The United States hadn’t even really seen “some possible effects” until three weeks after. 

COVID-19 has been impacting our community in many different ways that it has given us a new and different perspective on things including President Trump’s remarks.  We shouldn’t let it affect us mentally and emotionally as human beings because whatever we see on television could be false and it just gives us another reason to fact check what we see and hear. There were a lot of people who did not detect any type of sarcasm in his remarks, but since sarcasm is subjective, it’s best to leave it to readers to make up their own minds about the President’s real intentions. Like John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”