The media is lying about increased emergency calls about drinking bleach in order to blame Trump

by SooperMexican

And just like clockwork, the media is stepping in to help Democrats and other critics of Trump in their attempt to exaggerate what he said about injecting disinfectants to kill coronavirus.

The good people at Reason.com dismantle the headlines to show that this is all being exaggerated too:

One article making the rounds, from the New York Daily News, is headlined “A spike in New Yorkers ingesting household cleaners following Trump’s controversial coronavirus comments.” But the article makes no mention of anyone deliberately consuming household cleaners. It simply states that 30 people called the city’s poison control hotline “over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners.”

Fearing that you ingested something doesn’t jibe with having intentionally consumed that substance.

The authors of the Daily News piece, Anna Sanders and Chris Sommerfeldt, try to circumvent this inconvenient fact by noting that over the same time period in 2019, the Poison Control Center “only handled 13 similar cases.” And while this time, nine calls were about possible Lysol exposure and ten about bleach, last year’s calls contained “no cases reported about Lysol exposure and only two were specifically in regards to bleach.”

The writer goes on to explain how the increased calls are more likely due to our current pandemic and everyone being obsessed with disinfecting everything, not something directly attributable to Trump.

This makes a lot of sense. If you present me with evidence that legions of MAGA-fans are injecting chlorox because Trump said it, that’s one thing, but this is a completely different thing.

Here’s another one:

But the Daily News piece is far from the only poison-control story being framed misleadingly. A story out of Kentucky that’s being shared as “evidence” people have been consuming household cleaners following Trump’s Thursday statements is actually about calls to Kentucky poison control centers in March.

“Poison control centers around the country, including here in Kentucky, are seeing a spike in calls related to COVID-19,” says the WDRB.com story. Ashley Webb, director of the Kentucky Poison Control Center, told the outlet that “just in March, we saw about a 30% increase in hand sanitizer exposures and about a 50% increase in household cleaners.”

How are those the fault of Trump? If anything, it proves that most increases in calls are going to be because of coronavirus and not what the president said.

If you need a reminder of what Trump actually said, here’s a funny Tik Tok:

Or.. you could see our previous post here.


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