Americans across the country have likely heard all about President Donald Trump‘s comments regarding disinfectants amidst the coronavirus crisis. The president previously wondered aloud whether you could treat someone with the coronavirus with an “injection” of disinfectant, despite the fact that doing so would be incredibly dangerous. Shortly after he made those statements during a press conference on Thursday, many individuals immediately took to social media in order to react to his message. On Twitter, one user even took some time to share how Dr. Deborah Birx, a doctor on the White House’s coronavirus task force, reacted to the president’s statements.
Aaron Rupar, a journalist at Vox, posted a gif of Birx’s apparent reaction to some of Trump’s statements regarding disinfectants. In the gif, it appears as though she briefly breaks into a grimace before regaining her composure. Rupar’s captioned the gif by writing that you can see the moment in which Birx visibly reacts to Trump’s remarks. Of course, it would be an understandable reaction, as many were taken aback by the president’s comments.
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you can almost see Dr Birx’s soul leaving her body pic.twitter.com/iqtMTxVNLB
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2020
As previously mentioned, Trump made those remarks during a press conference on Thursday. At the time, he appeared with William Bryan of the Department of Homeland Security. During the conference, Bryan noted that you can kill the coronavirus on surfaces using disinfectants, which caused Trump to offer up his own opinion on the matter.
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you are going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you could do either through the skin or in some other way. I think you said that you are going to test that, too.”
“And then I saw the disinfectant, where knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way we could do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” the president continued. “As you see it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” Bryan then noted that cleaning lungs with a disinfectant is not possible, to which Trump replied with, “maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work.” (It should also be noted that an attempt to disinfect the lungs with disinfectants is not only not possible, but would pose a grave risk to one’s health.) On Friday, the president clarified his comments by claiming that he was using sarcasm.
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters just like you, just to see what would happen,” Trump said Friday, as NBC News reported. “I was asking a sarcastic and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it and it would kill it on the hands, and it would make things much better.”