CNN host and quarantine-breaker Chris Cuomo took President Trump’s inaccurate musings about whether disinfectants such as bleach and isopropyl alcohol, which kill the coronavirus on surfaces, could be used on the human body to cure someone already infected to task on Thursday.
“The study was about surfaces though, and what kind of light or other type of treatments and different media you could use to affect viruses on surfaces, not in the human body,” Cuomo said of the studies Trump referenced. “And the idea of household disinfectants inside the body, I mean, we can’t say enough, nobody was briefed on that. There is no science behind that. The only question is where the president got this or what did he misinterpret.”
Cuomo is correct — even if Trump wasn’t making an explicit endorsement of using disinfectant on the human body, a White House press briefing is an unacceptable setting for the president of the free world to spew shower thoughts about science he doesn’t understand during a pandemic. He deserves pushback from the media on this, and Cuomo was well within his rights to dedicate time to doing so.
But it’s equally worth asking why Cuomo can’t get his own wife to stop sharing that same sort of pseudoscience.
Cristina Cuomo, like her husband, contracted the coronavirus. She’s been documenting the family’s experience on the online blog for her high-end wellness magazine Purist. Although she has a lower profile than her husband, she still has over 100,000 followers on her Instagram account, which is largely dedicated to her blog. Cover stars for her print magazine have included A-listers such as Oprah Winfrey and Sarah Jessica Parker. In other words, Cristina Cuomo is a notable public wellness editor with a responsibility, at a minimum, to do no harm.
And yet she’s spent the coronavirus spewing precisely the same sort of dangerous ideas that can be found in QAnon chat rooms.
She’s endorsed a “vitamin drip,” which former CDC senior medical officer LaMar Hasbrouck says can introduce “potential toxicities” or “infection,” a spirometer that’s almost never used for non-bedridden patients, and a pulsed electromagnetic field machine whose efficacy in treating the coronavirus has no scientific basis whatsoever.
But most dangerous is her endorsement of a bleach bath containing about 120 times more chlorine than is necessary to sterilize water for drinking.
On Thursday, Cristina Cuomo initially wrote that she took bleach baths to “combat the radiation and metals in [her] system and oxygenate it.” This is crazy enough, but that night, she stealth-edited her post to argue that it was safe because Clorox is just “technically salt” — a dangerously misleading claim, given that “salt” usually refers to table salt, whereas bleach contains a toxic salt that reacts explosively with some household food and cleaning items. As Clorox’s website warns, “using a bleach and water solution for bathing is not approved by the EPA and should not be done.”
By morning, her piece had been stealth-edited yet again, to include a copy-and-paste of her previous explanation to attribute it to her “doctor,” Linda Lancaster, who is evidently not an actual medical doctor.
Drinking or injecting bleach is obviously far more fatal than bathing in it, but none of these is a particularly good idea. No sane person would argue that her responsibility for avoiding error in such matters stacks up against that of a president of the United States. But this is still Chris Cuomo’s wife, and as long as he’s going to point out Trump’s errors, he might counsel his wife to stop spreading dangerous pseudoscience as well.
