The Strange Story of Bleach and Disinfectants

In many countries, bleach is an everyday household item. Its main ingredient is sodium hypochlorite, which is derived from salt and is an environmentally friendly cleaning product. As the name implies, bleach as a chemical product is used primarily as a disinfectant to reduce the pigmentation of fabrics and to eliminate stains. Because of its power and versatility, Clorox, the first commercial company to discover and promote bleach, has been on Fortune’s World Top 500 list for years.

By definition, there is no company that would not want its product to be purchased and used by its customers. But unexpectedly, the major manufacturers of bleach, Lysol and Clorox, recently issued statements urgently warning the public not to use their products. Many people are puzzled as to why a good disinfection product suddenly cannot be used.

Unfortunately, the befuddlement has nothing to do with the quality of the product, but an extremely dangerous suggestion by the President of the United States. During an April 23rd press conference on how the coronavirus could be eliminated, a Department of Homeland Security researcher concluded that bleach could eliminate the virus on the surface. Trump, a person with no epidemiology background or medical training, abruptly suggested that ultraviolet lights and even injection of disinfectants like bleach can be used to as treatment for COVID-19 patients. According to Trump, these disinfectants “gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

This confused, absent-minded association quickly sparked grave concern among professionals and medical staff alike. For a large segment of the American population that lacks an actual educational background, they may not be able to use the appropriate scientific knowledge to understand the potential hazards associated with injecting or even drinking disinfectants. Just last month, an Arizona man died after took fish tank cleaner additives containing chloroquine, the drug Trump repeated touted as a miracle drug that can treat COVID-19 — despite its risks of causing cardiac arrest.

In several states including Maryland, Kentucky, Illinois, and New York, local news has found a terrifying increase in calls about whether or not one should inject or drink bleach to cure themselves from virus. Fortunately, unlike information on social media that is difficult to discern its veracity, the news did not report a single case of someone who was hospitalized for injecting or drinking bleach.

At the conference, a Washington Post reporter sat back and questioned Trump about the scientific basis for this theory. In contrast to answering his question, Trump, who had in mind how the right-wing media ecology would react, pointed dismissively at the journalist, saying, “I’m the president, and you’re fake news.”

After the chaotic press conference, several experts warned of the great dangers of doing so with the most blunt of theories. Pulmonologist Vin Gupta said that injecting disinfectant “is a common way to commit suicide”. Diane Calello, medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said the disinfectant will cause “severe multiple organ failure and direct explosion blood cells” when the substance enters the body.

For Trump, instigating a controversy is nothing more than proof of his success in showing his supporters that he can tease the left at will. At the press conference, pointing to his head, Trump said “I have a very smart ‘you know what’.”On the other hand, the new White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, who is known for her tit-for-tat questioning and satirizing interviewers in interviews, was even more unforgiving, and quickly turned the tables against the media and said “leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”

Sitting not far from Trump at the launch was Deborah Birx, an HIV immunologist and one of the White House Coronavirus Response coordinators. It’s disappointing that neither during Trump’s speech, nor in the interview that followed, did Birx offer any refutation of this almost insane suggestion. And her silence, as one of the few medical professionals on the Trump coronavirus response team, is an even more hopeless sadness. This means that in fear of the lambasting right-wing, Trumpist media and political apparatus, those professionals who are in charge of scientific guidances choose to put the most basic of sanity on the back burner in order to keep their place.

Her silence was not unreasonable: the right-wing news site Breitbart became a master of reasoning after Trump claimed the efficacy of bleach, and claimed with no evidence that Trump did not say he was asking the American public to inject disinfectants. Fox News also used the phrase “Media erupt over Trump comments on disinfectant and sunlight to cure coronavirus: Here’s what he said” to suggest that the mainstream media understood Trump’s statements out of context. In the thousands of words in that article, it is not until paragraph 13 that we read that the author agrees that Trump “did offer such advice” and thus refutes his title.

The people who are really cheering for President Trump’s fallacy are a group of believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, a die-hard group of Trump supporters who still little known in the country. They were convinced that Trump’s reference to “bleach” in the conference was a harbinger of the reassurance of their conviction that conspiracy theories were being reconfirmed and that some kind of untold secret was about to come to light.

The prototype of QAnon is participants in the anonymous image board communities 4chan and 8chan. Participants in these communities are extremely enthusiastic about discussing ideas involving racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, religious discrimination, anti-law enforcement, and other forms of discrimination, because they believe that these unethical so-called “ideas” are simply oppressed because of institutionalized political correctness. For Trump, who has never held a key government position before and who has made racist and sexist statements on the campaign trail, his election was marked by these communities as the last straw in the road to America’s rebirth.

It was this kind of thinking that led them to concoct the “pizzagate” theory in 2016. The word “pizza” appears repeatedly in Hillary Clinton’s campaign manger John Podesta’s internal emails, leaked through WikiLeaks, which drew the so-called inference for these communities that “top members of the Democratic National Committee were secretly hosting human trafficking and child sexual abuse rings in the basement of a pizza restaurant”. After falling for this theory, a North Carolina man, armed with a rifle, broke into a pizza restaurant where “pizzagate” purveyors claimed to be holding a pedophilic activities, shot the ceiling, claiming to be here to “save the children”. The man’s behavior resulted in him receiving a four-year sentence.

After the pizzagate faded into obscurity, cyber-conspiracy theorists remain convinced of the baseless theories of “deep state” and so-called “Democratic child sex ring” that are secretly thwarting Trump. At a 2017 dinner with a group of top military commanders and their spouses, during a photo session, Trump suddenly claimed “this ” represents “the calm before the storm”. When pressed repeatedly for what the phrase meant, Trump pointed to reporters, saying “You’ll find out”, and refused to clarify other than boasting the strength of the U.S. military.

The conspiracy theorists are getting the best of it. They see this as the great victory coming in Trump’s hard-fought confrontation with the deep state, the dawn of the light. Soon, an anonymous person calling himself “Q” on 4Chan, who identified himself as a senior figure in the Trump administration with high security clearance, began posting about the “calm before the storm” that Trump was about to announce the arrest of a large number of senior dignitaries after digging up hard evidence of their involvement in human trafficking and child sex abuse. By then, Trump was under the investigation of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and later assigned as Special Counsel for the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russian associates. In a desperate attempt to discredit Trump’s relatively disreputable image, “Q” repeatedly claimed on 4chan that Trump was only secretly helping the special counsel hunt down the real prey: those of the Democrats’ high command and “deep state” participants.

As the most influential political conspiracy theory group in recent years, QAnon’s believers abandon logic and reality when tracing their theories in favor of the belief that Q is the only one who can bring them the truth, while the rest of the visible reality is a hoax woven by top left-wing officials and the deep state. When CNN’s Gary Tuchman asked a woman wearing a QAnon T-shirt at a Trump supporter rally in 2018, he had the memorable exchange.

“Who do you think Q is?”

“It’s an entity of ten or less people that have high security clearance,” she replied.

“How do you know that?” Tuchman asked.

“I’m just telling you what it appears to be,” she said.

“What it appears to be,” Tuchman repeated. “So you don’t have any proof of it. You’re just guessing.”

“And you don’t have any proof there isn’t.”

Why would QAnon supporters absurdly believe in the magic of bleach as a “health magic” before Trump publicly claimed it?

QAnon believers often speculate that George Soros, Bill Gates and other billionaires are secretly plotting a “human purge”, and have steadfastly questioned that every year’s pandemic such as the flu, and subsequent vaccinations, are social engineering projects that secretly leads to the subjugation of mankind to “deep state”. They believe that the strong bactericidal and disinfecting effects of bleach happen to be able to counteract these insidious social engineerings that make the human body invulnerable to any kinds of poison.

Believers in QAnon tend to be equally skeptical of vaccines as nothing more than a dangerous tool for producing autism or even reducing the population. In some private Facebook communities, some mommy bloggers even directly post videos of their children drinking disinfectants as “real guidance on how to prevent epidemics”. In 2018, due to the rise of QAnon, there are dozens of books on retail sites like Amazon about using (injecting or ingesting into the body) bleach to counter government conspiracies, forcing them to take all books on bleach health off their website.

Of course, since Amazon owner Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, Amazon’s actions are just one part of this grand conspiracy in QAnon’s eyes. And for Facebook and YouTube, these behaviors are even more difficult — these accounts are like whack-a-mole— just pinned one down and another comes up immediately. Two mothers with children with autism, Melissa Eaton and Amanda Seigler, in a bid to counter the onslaught of QAnon’s crazy theories, took to Facebook and YouTube to convince mothers, over and over again, not to give their children bleach, using the common communication methods used by conspiracy theorists.

To get into these groups, Eaton and Seigler disguise themselves as desperate parents looking for answers to their child’s autism. Once they’re in, they screenshot some of the posts where parents describe feeding chemicals to their children, and these posts often have disastrous outcomes.

According to journalist Brandy Zadrozny, who the two mothers shared the screenshots:

“My son is constantly making a gasping sound,” posted one Kansas mother who claimed to treat her adult son with chlorine dioxide, according to screenshots shared by Eaton and Seigler. “He won’t open his mouth,” a Canadian mom wrote of her 2-year-old’s unwillingness to drink the chlorine dioxide. “He screams. Spits. Flips over.”

The two said they have reported more than 100 parents since 2016. They also reported the posts to Facebook and submitted their findings to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice and child abuse organizations.

QAnon has turned the use of bleach into a money-making trick: the so-called “experts” represented by one of QAnon’s most infamous peddlers, Jordan Sather, claim to have developed a product called “Miracle Mineral Solution” by diluting the bleach agent and citric acid. In their eyes, as a “miracle” that is not recognized by the FDA, it can cure autism, cancer, AIDS and, naturally, protect against the new coronavirus. Elsewhere, the solution continued to exist under names such as “20–20–20” after it was banned from sale by online platforms. The “miracle mineral solution” is still being used by desperate COVID-19 worriers and their relatives of people with autism, secretly buying and using it and escape the blow almost every time, despite a harsh crackdown by the US Food and Drug Administration.

This dangerous thinking is particularly acute in some evangelical religious groups, where Jim Humble, a self-proclaimed archbishop and Mexican church owner, claims to have discovered “20–20–20” during a gold rush in South America and to have promoted and sold it as “the only coronavirus solution the government doesn’t want you to know about”. In August 2019, a woman who had taken “20–20–20” to avoid contracting malaria died that night. Each of the purveyors of the “medical miracle” has absolved themselves from responsibility, insisting that they had nothing to do with it. In the opinion of journalists who have studied these groups, these counterfeit drug traffickers do not act in this way out of a noble ideal of “saving the world”, but in the excellent interest of selling the so-called ideal. In the interview, one of the journalist laments, “I really can’t imagine how the people who push this can sleep at night with any peace of mind.”

In the years since the rise of the alt-right, there have been countless completely avoidable tragedies that have been unfolding. In today’s crisis, when the epidemic is escalating and there are more than one million confirmed patients in the United States, QAnon believers, who do not want to comply with the rules of social distancing but are bent on making money from selling their snake oil treatment, can only be dangerously promoted in the rhetoric of a President who is equally mistrustful of scientific advice, whose complacency is unprecedented among any leaders in history, and who lacks basic common sense and respect.

Journalists and educators in the news media can no longer sit still. Long before Trump touted the efficacy of bleach, columnist Margaret Sullivan was pleading with major media outlets not to continue to broadcast Trump’s dangerous, uninformative press conferences live. In Sullivan’s view, there is no benefit other than the non-stop self-aggrandizement, frequent media attacks and outright lies (such as the claim in mid-March that “there are many available tests” and that hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating COVID-19).

In such an ecology, the media is being controlled by the president like puppets. Opinion writer Paul Waldman documented an interesting case of the phenomenon going into full affect: When the New York Times broke the story that Trump spends a lot of time every day watching TV instead of working, an outraged Trump quickly invited two reporters from the New York Post, a publication which was significantly more friendly to him, for a day trip to the White House. At the end of the trip, the two journalists published the story “White House officials say Trump works so hard, he often misses lunch” to discredit the New York Times story.

Hundreds of journalism educators, represented by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, co-signed a petition urging major media outlets to never broadcast a Trump press conference again: “Over the past few weeks, the president has become an intensifying font of misinformation and medically unsound, even lethal advice, making him the single most potent force for misinforming the American public about COVID-19. He has used briefings to repeatedly promote the use of Hydroxychloroquine as treatment, necessitating FDA warnings of its serious side effects and deaths were the drug used for this purpose. He has suggested that patients be injected with disinfectant to “clean” their lungs, prompting an outcry from medical professionals and compelling Lysol and Clorox to issue statements warning against any internal use of their products. While a long and established history of journalists covering presidential pronouncements and White House briefings exists, in their current form under this president, these briefings have degenerated into political rallies and forums for the president to denigrate his enemies.”

The reason these professors are angry is because this is the umpteenth time. In a summary by analyst Matthew Miller’s summary, Trump once suggested painting the border wall black, making it too hot to climb, energizing it with electricity and covering it with spikes. According to the New York Times, he had considered adding a moat full of hot water across the border with snakes and alligators in it. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers spent months building prototypes and had to repeatedly convince the commander-in-chief to abandon unrealistic, expensive, and changing requirements. He has asked why the government didn’t drop nuclear bombs on hurricanes before they made landfall. The government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, has been forced to intervene with the president several times over what Fauci calls policies that harm public health.

Such a phenomenon of journalists asked to halt coverage of a leader is be unprecedented in modern times. Will Trump’s dangerous media privileges be terminated by a bottle of bleach?