Just Saying | Donald Trump’s coronavirus ‘cure’ ideas are not just crazy but more dangerous than the disease
- Yonden Lhatoo is more alarmed than amused by the US president’s outlandish theories on curing Covid-19 by injecting patients with disinfectants or bombarding them with UV light
Among the variety of video clips that I’ve come across so far of people running the gamut of human thought, expression and behaviour in their imbecilic to insane responses triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, a recent one from India really tickled my fancy.
It features a distressed young man’s sincere plea in the middle of the world’s biggest lockdown to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “please, sir” open up the liquor shops for a couple of hours.
He complains about the unreasonable price of a quarter bottle of rum these days, then proceeds to postulate that if alcohol is such an effective external sanitiser, which he has been regularly using, as per Modi’s nationwide health advice, surely drinking it should be just as efficacious in cleaning his insides.
Hilarious as the village idiocy of his reasoning is, it’s also an alarming reminder that there are many around the world who easily buy into unmitigated poppycock of this kind with dangerous and tragic consequences that are nothing to laugh at.
Take, for example, coronavirus-stricken Iran, where hundreds have been killed in a side epidemic of drinking methanol in the rumour-driven belief that it would help cure Covid-19.