Trump suggests disinfectant cure for coronavirus - five other weird ideas from world leaders

Politicians have suggested working on tractors or eating turkey can stop Covid-19 in its tracks

Trump funny
(Image credit: (Mario Tama/Getty Images))

Doctors have dismissed Donald Trump’s suggestion that injections of disinfectant could cure the coronavirus as “jaw-dropping”.

Speaking at yesterday’s White House briefing, the US president said: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? It sounds interesting to me.”

Experts have poured scorn on the idea. Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley said: “Trump’s briefings are actively endangering the public’s health. Boycott the propaganda. Listen to the experts. And please don’t drink disinfectant.”

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Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, added: “It is incomprehensible to me that a moron like this holds the highest office in the land.”

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However, as The National reports, Trump is not the only world leader to suggest a novel way of beating the novel coronavirus.

The governor of the Mexican state of Puebla, Miguel Barbosa, says a culinary speciality made from turkey and mole, a traditional Mexican marinade, can act as a vaccine for Covid-19. He has previously claimed that poor people must be immune to Covid-19 because most of Mexico's confirmed cases were people who could afford to travel internationally.

The president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, says “there shouldn't be any panic” because farm work can heal Covid-19. “You just have to work, especially now, in a village,” he said. “There, the tractor will heal everyone. The fields heal everyone.”

The president of Tanzania says it is not by working on farms but by going to church that coronavirus will be beaten. He told a congregation that coronavirus is satanic and cannot survive in the body of Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, over in Turkmenistan, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, says you can beat coronavirus by simply inhaling the smoke from a burning desert-region plant called Peganuma harmala.

None of these treatments have received backing from medical experts.

 
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.