The county's public health director stood with other leaders on Friday in decrying the use of products like Lysol to treat symptoms: “People die from ingesting some of these products."
Though President Donald Trump walked back the controversial comments he made Thursday about the possibility of injecting disinfectants into the human body as a way to knock out the coronavirus, health experts and manufacturers of cleaning products continue to speak out about the potentially fatal danger of attempting such an experiment.
Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of L.A. County’s health department, was asked to respond to Trump’s statements Friday afternoon during her daily press briefing, and she acknowledged it as “misinformation that was circulating” since the president made his statement at the White House yesterday.
“Please don’t inject ingest or even put on your body any disinfectant,” said Ferrer. “It’s extraordinarily dangerous. That’s not what the products are meant for and no scientific evidence that it would be safe or prevent you from becoming infected.”
Trump offered injections as a potential solution after hearing from another official about research that showed the effectiveness disinfectants like bleach and alcohol have in killing the novel coronavirus on surfaces. “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning…it would be interesting to check that,” Trump said.
Today, Trump said he was “asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.”
Ferrer said she’d like to believe that. “I really hope the president was being sarcastic. It really doesn't matter, the most important thing is that people shouldn’t use those products for anything other than cleaning,” she continued, saying that they are not therapeutic medicines and can be harsh and “extraordinarily dangerous” to the human body. “People die from ingesting some of these products. We want to make sure the public understands that that information was not accurate.”
More to come.
