A medical specialist smokes near ambulances equipped with lung ventilators, purchased by local authorities for patients infected with coronavirus disease.March 19, 2020. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

In response to No, President Trump Did Not Make Anyone Ingest Fish Tank Cleaner

Below, our Charlie Cooke links to an explanation of why chainsaws are sold with a warning tag that tells users not to hold the wrong end. “It’s often cheaper, and simpler, to warn consumers about things that many may find obvious than it is to defend a defective product lawsuit.”


Fear of liability is one reason why we are warned that the sleeping pill Nytol “may cause drowsiness,” that wheelbarrows are not intended for highway use, that the Air Erasable Marker “should not be used as a writing instrument for signing checks or any legal documents, as signatures will fade or disappear completely,” and Apple Inc. feels the need to instruct us to not eat our iPod shuffle. But another reason is the disturbingly tenacious existence of stupid people. All around the world, governments spend enormous resources attempting to battle the societal menace of stupid people — they’re called “schools” — and yet stupid people persist, in every country and culture on our planet.

The Tide Pod challenge, the Bird Box challenge, and the Darwin Awards are continuous demonstrations of an important scientific conclusion: Some human beings are really, really stupid. And those of us who are not stupid have a hard time imagining how stupid people think and predicting what stupid people will do. We will win the battle against coronavirus long before we win the battle against the existence of stupidity.


From the first reports of the coronavirus, President Trump’s public comments have often been unrealistically optimistic — “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China,” “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in.” “The 15 [cases] within a couple of days, is going to be down to zero.”

Trump’s effusive public comments about the potential effectiveness of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, as well as the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, are in the same vein. Comments from the president like this probably do more damage than good; if these treatments don’t pan out, the disappointment will be considerable. It is completely understandable that the president wants to give people hope and tout every potentially promising research avenue, and cautious optimism is fine. The president just rarely remembers the “cautious” part.

But it is unrealistic to expect the President of the United States to foresee that people will eat fish tank cleaner without consulting with any medical professional of any kind. And if you are the kind of person who runs around your home, looking for house chemicals whose ingredient list includes any substance that sounds kind of like a drug that the president mentioned . . . well, you’re pretty much doomed anyway; you probably thought your iPod looked delicious until you saw the warning label.