Good for CNN's John King for stopping one of these Republican liars in their tracks for once. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy was asked about Trump's ridiculous remarks about UV light and injecting disinfectants as a treatment for coronavirus, and and the fact that the CDC itself had to issue a warning on the use of household cleaners.
Cassidy did his best to downplay the real danger to public health that Trump represents, saying that no one took his advice seriously, and King was having none of it.
We’re in the position this past week where the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Surgeon General had to put out public statements, essentially saying, and this is my translation, don’t listen to the president, be careful here.
As a doctor, what goes through your mind when the president dispenses medical advice and have you ever thought about picking up the phone and saying, sir, please, don’t?
CASSIDY: The president speaks in such a way — people are not going to inject themselves, and when I hear this kind of conversation around that, I think to myself, we should be talking about how do we use data to guide where we can reopen the economy, not about what the president said on Lysol, because, really, no one is going to inject themselves with Lysol.
KING: But, I'm sorry, I just need to interrupt here. I hope you’re right sir, but, f you talk to the — on the Maryland hotline, they got a lot of phone calls. You see these searches here. He at least puts the nugget in people’s minds. If he hadn’t mentioned it, those searches don’t happen, those phone calls don’t happen, the time is not wasted and we can get to the point you’re trying to make.
CASSIDY: So, we can talk about Lysol, if you want to, John. We really can. What we should be talking about is how do we use data in order to keep people safe and reopen an economy. Now, we can talk about searches, or we can talk about R0. R0 is the rate of the transmissibility of a virus, if we lower it less than 1, we can reopen an economy safely. Now, that’s not Lysol. Maybe that doesn't kind of light up a headline, but it is what opens our economy, and frankly, that’s what I'm focused on.
KING: Sir, that's what I'd love to focus on, but we also do have to cover the president of the United States when he says things.
I'd love to see the Senator try to explain to any of his constituents that what Trump said was just some sort of a joke if one of their loved ones has died because they listened to him.
