This should really, truly, and honestly go without saying, but alas, stupid times call for stupid warnings: Do not bathe in bleach, and absolutely do not even entertain injecting it or consuming it in any way to combat the coronavirus or any of its effects.
What preempts this idiot-proof warning? A unique confluence of the two ideological tips of the uber-wealthy, namely the conspiratorial crackpots from the dregs of the “conservative” Right and the hippie-dippie dummies of the Hamptons’ Goop girls and limousine liberals.
Back in January, when President Trump still claimed that the country had the coronavirus “totally under control,” prominent believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory were publicly boasting that drinking bleach would cure the pandemic. Their preferred poison is a mix sold as “Miracle Mineral Supplement,” a bleach blend long-pitched prior to the coronavirus outbreak to mothers who’d rather risk their children dying rather than raise a child with autism. The FDA has warned about the MMS and the bogus consumption of bleach for years, but amid QAnon’s renewed interest in the life-threatening hoax, the Trump administration cracked down on the main distributors of the mix. Then, on Thursday night, Trump decided to entertain the notion that there’s “a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning” with cleaning disinfectant.
To be clear, a virus extant on a surface is radically different to one attached, bound, and then fused to human cells. A spray of disinfectant can kill the coronavirus on a counter, but ingest it, and it’ll harm and possibly kill you — but it won’t inhibit copies of the coronavirus from multiplying and infecting even more of your cells.
The Left loses the loony science wars in this case — if only because it’s difficult to top the leader of the free world waxing poetic about a conspiratorial sham of a cure that could kill people. But make no mistake: No political stripe has a monopoly on stupid.
We’re used to Gwyneth Paltrow and her ilk pushing pseudoscience, but in a time of pandemic, what once read as wacky wine-mom musings are now a more sinister manifestation of rank privilege. A Paltrow pal and Goop contributor outright denied the existence of the coronavirus as reported, denying the scientific consensus of the germ theory of disease. But even more moronic was the wife of CNN host and coronavirus superspreader Chris Cuomo.
Cristina Cuomo, who is not a medical doctor or licensed health professional of any kind, doubled down on her absurd assertion that taking a bleach bath could in any way help during the coronavirus.
On Thursday, Cristina Cuomo, who has taken a number of scientifically unproven but likely innocuous “treatments” for the coronavirus, wrote, “Both days, I added 1/2 cup of Clorox to my bathwater to combat the radiation and metals in my system and oxygenate it.”
By the evening, she had stealth-edited the section and somehow made it even more scientifically illiterate.
“We want to neutralize heavy metals because they slow-up the electromagnetic frequency of our cells, which is our energy field, and we need a good flow of energy,” Cuomo wrote. “Clorox is sodium chloride — which is technically salt. There is no danger in doing this. It is a simple naturopathic treatment that has been used for over 75 years to oxygenate the cells.”
(Fact check: Clorox absolutely is not just “technically salt,” and medical professionals have advised not to use bleach on skin during the coronavirus because it corrupts the body’s natural physical defenses and unnecessarily dries out the skin.)
By Friday morning, the piece was stealth-edited again. This time, the above quote was directly attributed to Dr. Linda Lancaster. Whereas in Thursday night’s version of the blog, Cuomo simply referenced her book Harmonic Healing, today’s version claims that she said the above quote, verbatim, and that Cuomo took the bleach baths “at the direction of my doctor, Dr. Linda Lancaster.”
You will not be terribly shocked to find that Lancaster is both a Goop contributor and evidently not a medical doctor. Her official website provides no evidence of licensing, and the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicines, which she founded, claims she has a Ph.D. and a Doctor of Naturopathy.
By all means, drink more kombucha, eat more spinach, and take more ginger. But don’t listen to the wack job wealthy, and please keep the bleach in your cleaning closet.
