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Governors say Trump’s disinfectant comments prompted hundreds of poison center calls
Govs. Larry Hogan of Maryland (R) and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan (D) said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s recent comments musing about whether disinfectant could potentially be injected as a remedy for the coronavirus caused a surge in phone calls to emergency hotlines in their states inquiring about its truth.
“When misinformation comes out, or you just say something that pops in your head, it does send a wrong message,” Hogan said on ABC’s This Week. “We had hundreds of calls come into our emergency hotline at our health department asking if it was right to ingest Clorox or alcohol cleaning products — whether that was going to help them fight the virus.”
Hogan lamented that the government had to “put out that warning to make sure that people were not doing something like that, which would kill people.”
And he offered a critique of the president’s behavior at the White House’s coronavirus press conferences: “This has been important to me from day one, communicating very clearly on the facts, because people listen to these press conferences, they listen when the governor holds a press conference, and they certainly pay attention when the president of the United States is standing there giving a press conference,” Hogan said.
In an earlier appearance on This Week, Whitmer said she too had seen a worrying uptick in calls about ingesting disinfectants.
“When the person with the most powerful position on the planet is encouraging people to think about disinfectants, whether it was serious or not, people listen,” Whitmer said. “And so we have seen an increase in numbers of people calling poison control, and so I think it’s really important that every one of us with a platform disseminate medically accurate information.”
