I hear injecting bleach is effective!
"I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen"
Well, at least he knows what would happen now - Disinfectant related phone calls to poison control hotlines up hundreds of percent:
"Hundreds" of callers reportedly asked poison control if disinfectant could fight the coronavirus in the human body. It can't.
globalnews.ca
As a great theorycrafter myself I could have sympathy - his original comments were questions, but ones that didn't need to be asked on the international stage in front of the eyes of the world, they needed to be asked and investigated in labs and publicly announced and used if effective and discarded if not.
I could come up with a theory right now... infuse a nebuliser with a very low level of Lipase (the enzyme that deals with fats) which patients could breathe in, disintegrating any new virals that emerge from already infected cells because the virals are covered in a fat layer they need to function.
There we go, 'BobFace's theory. It doesn't mean lipase works that way on viruses or that it would not do more harm to the lungs in the first place. It would have to be the work of scientists to find out which type of lipase would do the most good with the least damage, intracellular, extracellular etc, and make sure that even if it did work on the virus it didn't convert the parts of the dead virus into something equally as bad, like lung-eating acids or something worse that could not be countered with a PH modifier... if it's even a valid treatment at all lipase may not even touch a viral spore.
It's about the scope, scale and setting of where the theory was floated, combined with the fact people are looking to him for answers, not more questions. If 1 in 1 million people would take that kind of comment seriously and give it a go "to see what happens" that's 300 Americans mainlining toilet cleaner.
The difference between me and the POTUS is I don't have an audience of 7 billion hopeful souls and I'm genuinely theorizing for a treatment, not bring sarcastic.
But then again as he's stated it was indeed a malicious fictitious comment, so perhaps I could not have much sympathy after all.