After suggesting that Covid-19 patients be injected with disinfectants as a cure—whether this was delivered with sarcasm or not is a task for better body language readers than press folks—US president Donald Trump has tweeted that he will not be attending any briefing on his administration’s handling of the pandemic. The American media has been hostile towards him, for something as trivial as ratings and viewership, Trump says. So, the Oval Office’s response to demands of accountability is a big, fat sulk. The Trump administration and, indeed, the Republican Party have upped their anti-China rhetoric, against a backdrop of the federal government failing to recognise the crisis early on and take steps such as wide testing and containment. And, in the midst of a raging pandemic, the Trump administration suspended funding to the WHO. The president has claimed that he was being sarcastic when he talked about injecting disinfectant and exposure to high-dose UV rays as ways to fight Covid-19. But, it seems the sarcasm was not just lost on the media present, but very nearly every thinking person in the room.
That Reckitt Benckiser, the manufacturer of Dettol and Lysol, had to put out a statement warning against the products being injected into a human body shows how much damage a Trump “being sarcastic”—while people have died in the tens of thousands in the US because of Covid-19—can cause. And, it is not just Trump. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro believes the pandemic is a hoax created by the media. As nations—including low- and middle-income countries—across the world are going into lockdown, Bolsanaro was busy attending an anti-lockdown rally. These leaders need a reality check before they condemn more lives to the pandemic with their callousness.