Olivia Pierson
oliviapierson.org

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” 

Winston Churchill

I heard Richard Prebble on the Leighton Smith podcast today parrot the fake news lie about President Trump telling people to inject/swallow bleach as a cure for COVID-19.

Prebble said:

?“It was only when Trump suggested that people start swallowing bleach that his popularity fell.”  

It tripped off his tongue as if he thought he was on very solid ground in knowing what the hell he was talking about. He doesn’t, on this topic at least. He’s just being a dummy.

So, for all the other dummies out there who think this is true because the fake news media says it is, I’ll explain to you why it was just another hysterical lie made up by Trump’s enemies.

That particular Coronavirus Taskforce press briefing, the origin of where this false accusation against Trump came from, is available for anyone to view for themselves on YouTube. 

Bill Bryan, Director of Science and Technology at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was doing research for the Taskforce on the biology of the virus and took the podium to present their recent findings that on surfaces, doorhandles, bench tops etc, the virus was rapidly killed just by exposure to humidity and higher temperatures. But if you “injected” (Bryan’s term) UV rays or sunlight “into that” (experiments on virus particles, I assume) the half-life of the virus goes from 6 hours to 2 minutes. He used the term “inject” quite a few times to mean “introduce,” as I don’t see how you can actually inject UV rays or sunlight through a hypodermic needle.

Bryan then explains that his team works with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, to have a droplet of the virus suspended in the air in something like a Home Depot bucket but 4 times the size – to do the aerosol testing (saliva and respiratory fluids) which before then had not been done.  

Bryan goes on to say they were testing disinfectants and their ability to kill the virus in seconds – especially bleach and isopropyl alcohol.  All of this testing was to prevent exposure and transmission of the virus.

Bryan finishes up and Trump comes to the podium and says while thinking aloud: 

“I’ll ask Bill a question that maybe some of you are thinking of, if you’re into this world – because it’s very interesting… Supposing we hit the body with either ultraviolet or just very powerful light.”

Trump then looks over to Bryan and asks: 

“And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it?” 
(Which means they had discussed this before this highly public moment.)

Trump, intimating their earlier conversation, says:  

“Then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or some other way,”

– again Trumps looks over to Bryan and asks: 

“And I think you said you’re going to test that too?  It sounds interesting.”

Then Trump continues this spitballing style with Bryan in the room with the press pool and says:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute [the virus] and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?  Because it [the virus] gets on the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs.  It would be interesting to check that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors… but it sounds interesting to me.”

That was it.

So Trump asks the Director of Science and Tech a question about potential new ways to kill the virus (not only on surfaces) and it was spun the next day into different variations of:

“Trump told Americans to inject or swallow bleach, lysol and other household disinfectants!”

Pure fake news.  No such thing was said.  Anyone can check the whole thing out for themselves in the context of the ideas being thrown around the room. 

What Trump actually said was so unobjectionable that even the press pool, who mostly hate his guts and do nothing but try to play professional “gotcha” everyday – barely batted an eyelid about it for the next 35 minutes of intense questioning.

In fact, the press pool were strongly engaged in trying to show how stupid he was for encouraging people to spend a bit of time outside in the sunshine. 

This pathetic question came from an unpleasantly nasal journalist who sounds as though his nuts have never dropped, and it illustrates the gotcha-game in play perfectly:

“Mr. President, after the presentation we just saw about the heat and the humidity, is it dangerous for you to make people think they’re safe by going outside in the heat considering so many people are dying in Florida and considering this virus has had an outbreak in Singapore, places that are hot and humid?”

Trump gets pretty tetchy and sarcastically retorts in his amusing way:

“Here we go.  The new headline is ‘Trump asks people to go outside – that’s dangerous!’ Here we go… same old group.  Are you ready? I hope people go outside and enjoy the sun and if it has an impact, that’s great.” 

Trump then looks over to his medical science team, and as if taking the piss in a black-comedic public parody says:

“I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there is any way to apply light and heat to a cure – maybe you can maybe you can’t, I don’t know.  I’m not a doctor. I’m just a person who has a good..  you know what…”

… and he points to his head.

At no time did he remotely “encourage people to drink, swallow or ingest bleach,” and at no time did he encourage people to “inject disinfectant into their bodies.” 

However, the next day was not the headline Trump had sarcastically predicted it might be.  

?The headline from Nancy Pelosi’s Twitter account was:

Mr. President, drinking bleach and injecting Lysol won’t make it disappear. 

Joe Biden tweeted out:

I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach!

Joe didn’t need to say that, but we know dementia patients are prone to mindless ejaculations.

The whole world media then went mad, because they’re instructed to, as they’ve done so many times before when they are told that Trump has said or done something egregiously objectionable. They nod and obey.

Remember how abandoning the Kurds in Syria was going to create a mass genocide? 
Remember how the assassination of General  Qasem Soleimani was going to immediately ignite WWIII?
Remember when the killing of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi was going to severely upset the Muslims?  (Whereas the assassination of Usama Bin Laden, by Obama, would somehow not illicit a response.)
Remember how moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was going to “cause an absolute explosion” and ruin peace in the Middle East for all time?  

This “Trump said drink bleach” bullshit was only ever a dirty little Democrat tactic, a filthy lie, concocted and sprayed out of every single news orifice known to man in order to make Trump look foolish.

And here in this country at the bottom of the world, we have “thoughtful” folks, like Prebble – well educated, well travelled, well informed and yet repeating this kind of on the fly, cheap bullshit on a podcast as if it’s the gospel truth. 

The really odd thing is that we still use chlorine to disinfect our town water supplies, which means most of us actually do ingest disinfectant every single day of our lives and we give it to our babies and children – and nobody gives a stuff.

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I value the principles which became the hallmarks of Western democracy, made possible by the Age of Reason; religious tolerance (a wall between religion and state), a commitment to scientific inquiry,...