‘What do you have to lose?’: Here’s how many people could have died if they’d believed Donald Trump and used bleach to fight COVID

2020 was a blur of sourdough baking, Zoom meetings, Tiger King, and the anxiety of knowing you could contract a terrifying virus at any moment. It was also a time when politicians, celebrities, and people you follow on social media alike said some truly stupid things about COVID-19… Donald Trump (unsurprisingly) being one of them.

While we know Trump says dumb and incredibly offensive things on a daily (hourly? minute by minute?) basis, one of the scariest statements he made was encouraging people to ingest bleach if they had COVID. In April 2020, CNN reported that during a briefing at the White House, Trump said disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute, one minute” and would be “almost a cleaning.” He also wanted Dr. Deborah Birx, the COVID task force coordinator, to “speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure” COVID. It’s clear that if people had listened to Trump’s offhand medical advice, they could have died.

However, figuring out exactly how many might have died is a little more complicated. According to Politico, 17,000 people might have passed away after using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in the first wave. A study in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy explained that it seems likely that 16,990 who reside in the United States, France, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and Belgium passed away after taking hydroxychloroquine when they had COVID. Politico reported that there could have been even more fatalities, because the study looked at six countries and not the whole world.

This seems obvious, but ingesting bleach is dangerous enough on its own, COVID-19 or no COVID-19, so if you took Trump‘s suggestion and swallowed some, you put your life at risk.

But things get a little more complicated here, statistically speaking, because while drinking bleach can be fatal, as noted by Healthline, we don’t know how many people actually took Trump’s terrible and irresponsible advice. Trump’s claims are completely false, but we already knew that — unfortunately, he has a lot of influence, so it would make sense if some people did listen to him, potentially answering Trump’s question “What do you have to lose?” with their lives.

It’s basically impossible to figure out exactly how many people ingested bleach when they got COVID-19, though. In 2020, the CDC reported that when they asked 502 Americans, they learned that 4% took bleach… which would translate to 12 million Americans. But it was an imperfect study, according to Harvard Business Review. It would be absolutely wild if that many people drank bleach after getting COVID, so it makes sense that these results seem to be false. Also, let’s compare those numbers to the COVID deaths that have been documented. According to The Washington Post, there were “at least” 1,133,650 deaths between February 29th, 2020 and May 11th, 2023.

2020 and 2021 were scary years, and people desperately sought ways to prevent serious illness if they did contract COVID. I live in Toronto, where we were under lockdown from March 2020 to June 2021, and it was a dark time. But we need to listen to doctors, not someone like Trump, who doesn’t even make sense and repeats himself ad nauseam.

One thing we do know: we’re grateful to Joe Biden, because before dropping out of the 2024 race, he said, “Don’t inject bleach. And don’t vote for the guy who told you to inject bleach.” Biden, who has had the virus more than once, takes the pandemic seriously, and so should everyone. This is yet another reminder that the next President should agree bleach is a household cleaner, and not a legitimate treatment for a virus.