Trump Didn’t Tell People to ‘Inject Bleach’ for COVID-19. But Here’s What He Did Say

During the first presidential candidates’ debate of the 2024 election campaign, U.S. President Joe Biden revived a claim that has circulated about former President Donald Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since April 2020.

In his opening remarks of the June 27, 2024, CNN debate, Biden said the pandemic was “badly handled” by Trump and “many people were dying.” He then claimed (at 3:27 in the video below) his predecessor once told people to “inject a little bleach in your arm; it’d be all right.”

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Social media users repeated similar versions of this assertion on X in mid-July 2024.

However, examples of this claim had been circulating online for four years, following a media briefing conducted by the then-president on April 23, 2020, during which Trump discussed using disinfectants, such as bleach, in the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though Trump’s comments made little sense and were ridiculed and described as dangerous by experts, under any reasonable interpretation of his words, he didn’t explicitly suggest people should inject themselves with bleach or other household disinfectants.

Instead, while floating the idea to the government’s coronavirus task force and the media, Trump asked whether injecting disinfectants “inside” could help fight the virus, as we further outline below. Therefore, because Biden’s remarks were at best a misinterpretation and at worst a misrepresentation of what Trump said, we rated this claim “Mostly False.”

So What Did Trump Actually Say?

On April 23, 2020, Trump conducted an hourlong media briefing with members of the government’s coronavirus task force (transcript).

The then-president spoke several times throughout the conference, but just over 26 minutes in, he took over from the head of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, Bill Bryan, who had just been discussing the use of ultraviolet light and disinfectants — such as bleach and isopropyl alcohol — to kill the virus rapidly on nonporous surfaces.

In an apparent reference to Bryan’s earlier comments, Trump then said (around the 26:51 mark):

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much. So I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too.  It sounds interesting.

ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN:  We’ll get to the right folks who could.

THE PRESIDENT:  Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Four minutes later, a journalist responded to Trump’s disinfectant comments by asking whether there was any scenario in which cleaning products like bleach and isopropyl alcohol would be injected into people.

Bryan replied first, saying: “No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab, our lab.”

Trump then clarified his own remarks, adding: “It wouldn’t be through injection. We’re talking about through almost a cleaning, sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work. But it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object.”

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At no point in the media briefing did the then-president recommend that people inject bleach or other disinfectants into their bodies. He merely asked experts whether disinfectants could be injected to tackle COVID-19; a stance he later rowed back on when pressed by a journalist.

A day later, on April 24, 2020, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office his question about injecting disinfectants was a “sarcastic question” to “see what would happen”:

I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen… I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic, question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.

He then denied he was asking medical experts to look into injecting people with disinfectants.

Criticism of Trump’s Comments

Nonetheless, Trump’s comments about injecting disinfectants drew widespread criticism from experts.

Reckitt Benckiser, the Britain-based maker of cleaning, disinfectant and antiseptic products Dettol and Lysol, said in a statement: “We must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”

John Balmes, a pulmonologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told Bloomberg on April 24, 2020, inhaling chlorine bleach “would be absolutely the worst thing for the lungs.” 

“The airway and lungs are not made to be exposed to even an aerosol of disinfectant …. Not even a low dilution of bleach or isopropyl alcohol is safe …. It’s a totally ridiculous concept.”

Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and global health policy expert, told NBC News that same day: “This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible, and it’s dangerous …. It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves.”

Sources