No, Trump is Not Crazy for Suggesting UV Light and Disinfectants to Treat Covid

Journalism is a long-lost art, once used to inform people, reporting news in an unbiased manner, offering reasoned opinion in a balanced way. Now the singular goal of most American journalism is to make President Trump look bad, parsing his words or taking them completely out of context. The ultimate goal is to influence the upcoming election in a manner that Russia could only dream of.

Big media is attempting to do what impeachment, Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, and others have tried but failed miserably. Now it’s on to the Chinese Coronavirus and an ongoing critique of the Trump’s response, ranging from how he overreacted to underreacted, and everything in between.

The latest is the hysterical reaction to Trump suggesting that sunlight, high humidity or possibly an "injection" of "the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute" could be COVID-19 treatments during a White House briefing last week. Speaker Pelosi outrageously claimed, “The President is asking people to inject Lysol into their lungs.”

The rest of the media joined in, with headlines like, “Trump’s disinfectant ideas horrify doctors and academics.” His comments were described as “musings”, another way of saying “thinking outside the box”, a concept unknown within the Washington DC bureaucracy. They don’t seem to understand that Amazon, Apple, Uber, SpaceX, and Airbnb were similar “musings” once upon a time.

The ivory tower physicians are outraged that Trump suggested one might use a disinfectant to treat the Wuhan virus. The same brilliant physician scientists, in their starched white coats, tell us the obvious, as UK professor of medicine Paul Hunter warned, “Injecting disinfectants likely would kill anyone who tried it.” Interestingly this professor is from the University of East Anglia, famous in climate change circles, where his colleagues fudged climate and temperature data, not a paradigm of integrity as far as academic institutions go.

Trump suggested two ideas, not recommendations, simply possibilities that he would leave up to the medical experts to further analyze. He most certainly did not recommend injecting a disinfectant into one’s body.

YouTube screen grab

UV light injection technology is under development by Aytu BioScience and Cedars-Sinai hospital as, “A potential first-in-class COVID-19 treatment.” Their website is scant on details which they explain as, “It is getting quite a backlash.” Backlash indeed. YouTube removed their video explaining the technology and Twitter suspended the company’s account. How dare they go against the white coat orthodoxy of testing and contact tracing.

UV light for disease treatment has been around since the 1870s and one of the first researchers received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1903. Johns Hopkins promotes UV light as a treatment for lymphoma, “The blood is sent through a machine that exposes it to a special UV (ultraviolet) light. The light kills the lymphoma cells. The blood is then returned to the body.”

A Columbia University researcher, “Believes far-UVC light – safe for humans, but lethal for viruses – could be a game changer.” Perhaps President Trump is intrigued and mentioned the possibility at his briefing. How dare he toss out an idea that hasn’t been proven six ways to Sunday, giving a demoralized country hope that better days lie ahead. 

Anyone want to bet that if a Democrat president suggested such a potential treatment that they would be lauded as a brilliant visionary? If Obama were president, he would likely be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for such an idea, much like his Nobel Peace Prize, which he received only for his “soaring rhetoric” rather than bring peace anywhere.

Can UV light kill viruses? Ask Amazon. They have pages of listings for various UV light sanitizers and sterilizers. There is also science behind the concept as this paper suggests, 

“This study establishes far-UVC delivered from a laser through an optical diffuser as a viable solution for disinfection of susceptible regions such as around catheters, drivelines, or other skin penetrating medical devices.”

Moving on to disinfectants, President Trump is not suggesting people drink Lysol or Clorox as the media claim. Again, there is ample precedent in this realm of science.

Look what the CDC endorses, “Chlorination is the process of adding chlorine to drinking water to disinfect it and kill germs.” Yet the same CDC notes that chlorine is a poison. In fact, chlorine was used in World War 1 as a nerve gas. Yet we drink this poisonous disinfectant every day in our water.

Another example is polyethylene glycol. It has a variety of industrial, non-medical uses including as an artifact preservative, as a missile propellent, skin lubricant, in toothpaste and in body armor, an ink solvent in computer printers, an anti-foaming agent in drinks, and as a binder in ceramics. This is not something even Trump would recommend putting into your body.

Yet this nasty substance is used as a colonic lavage for chronic constipation, as this published medical study illustrates. Lavage refers to washing out a body cavity with a medicated solution. Another study found that polyethylene glycol, as a colonic lavage, “May be an effective alternative therapy in the treatment of chronic constipation.” This latter study was also a “double-blind, placebo-controlled study”, the type so favored by the basketball player and scarf-queen.

So, you can put certain disinfectants into body cavities to treat disease. Another example of using a nasty industrial chemical as a lavage is aluminum potassium sulfate. It has numerous industrial uses including in styptic pencils, as a fire retardant, for leather tanning, wool dying, even “dissolving steels while not affecting aluminum or base metals.” What idiots would even consider putting something like that into the human body?

The famous Mayo Clinic did. Doctors used this toxic industrial substance to treat hemorrhagic cystitis, a side effect in the bladder from anticancer chemotherapy. Patients who failed continuous bladder irrigation with saline had a 60 percent rate of resolution of their cystitis after irrigation with aluminum potassium sulfate. Imagine that.

In my world, povidone-iodine, a skin disinfectant, can be placed on the surface of the eye as a treatment of viral conjunctivitis, or pink eye. An optometry journal described this as a “silver bullet.” 

This same solution, trade name Betadine, is used on the surface of the eye before injections for macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy as well as before eye surgery, as a disinfectant. It is considered the “standard of care” before intravitreal injections, despite the product label warning, “Do not use in the eyes.” 

Once upon a time, use of such toxic products in the human body might have been considered crazy. If they were proposed by President Trump, the media would be apoplectic. And the public reaction, fueled by media hysteria, would have prevented these now useful treatments from ever becoming mainstream.

The media and the left beclown themselves by automatically and reflexively rejecting and castigating any idea from Trump. After several months immersed in the Wuhan flu pandemic, with models, projections, and momentous socio-economic decisions, the president likely has a good base of knowledge about viruses. 

He is thinking out loud, outside the box, asking the “what if” questions preceding every great invention or scientific breakthrough. Most ideas never amount to anything, but many do.

As George Bernard Shaw said, “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not’?”

That is exactly what President Trump is doing, going beyond the faulty models guiding the thinking of the basketball player and scarf-queen. Unfortunately, the media can’t help themselves, opposing anything and everything Trump suggests, from hydroxychloroquine to UV light and disinfectants.

Since Trump made those comments, and the media’s hair lit on fire, the daily task force briefings have become shorter, more infrequent, and with fewer questions. Trump and his task force are busy and don’t have time to waste with reporters only interested in destroying his presidency.

Imagine a past President Trump suggesting things like electricity, cars, computers or airplane flight. If we had the same media as we do know, we would still be using candles and a horse and buggy.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a Denver based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, and QuodVerum.