President Donald Trump, who speculated last year that sunlight might neutralize the coronavirus, has been vindicated as a recent study claims UV rays might actually kill the virus eight times fast than previously believed.
UC Santa Barbara released its findings of a multi-university study this past week which took an in-depth look at the role sunshine plays in neutralizing active viral particles.
“In a letter in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Oregon State University, University of Manchester and ETH Zurich examines another of SARS-CoV-2’s well known characteristics — its vulnerability to sunlight. Their conclusion? It might take more than UV-B rays to explain sunlight inactivation of SARS-CoV-2,” the university noted.
When blasting the virus in synthetic saliva with UVB light in a lab setting, researchers set out to test a theory that, if predictions were accurate, might have seen “sunlight inactivation of SARS-CoV-2” occur with prolonged exposure to ultraviolet rays.
“The theory predicts that inactivation should happen an order of magnitude slower,” said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz said.
The joint university study noted something peculiar: “In the experiments, viruses in simulated saliva and exposed to UV-B lamps were inactivated more than eight times faster than would have been predicted by the theory.”
The school added, “[cultured samples] in a complete growth medium before exposure to UV-B were inactivated more than three times faster than expected,” but the study concluded more research was needed.
“So, scientists don’t yet know what’s going on,” Luzzatto-Fegiz said. “Our analysis points to the need for additional experiments to separately test the effects of specific light wavelengths and medium composition.”
The initial findings are obviously good news for those hoping to relax outdoors and enjoy the natural vitamin booster and disinfectant that is sunshine.
But this study is also interesting for another reason; the mainstream media shredded Trump last April for suggesting that sunshine might kill the coronavirus. Left-wing CNN even hit the former president with a fact check which relied on misconstruing his statements to discredit him.
A team of so-called CNN “fact checkers” concocted a web story, which was headlined: “Fact check: Trump dangerously suggests sunlight and ingesting disinfectants could help cure coronavirus.”
Trump, of course, never suggested “ingesting disinfectants,” but an agenda-driven media which doesn’t understand humor or nuance found a narrative to undercut him.
“After Bill Bryan, the acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, explained during the briefing that new experiments show the coronavirus does not fare well under sunlight or heat, the President suggested that Americans who have the virus could treat it by going out into the sunlight on a hot day,” CNN reported.
The outlet then quoted Trump.
“There’s been a rumor that — you know, a very nice rumor — that you go outside in the sun or you have heat and it does have an effect on other viruses,” Trump said on April 24 of last year. Trump joked, as he so often did when keeping things light when possible, that essentially it would be convenient to treat the virus through using light or disinfectants, or “a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
CNN surrendered in paragraph nine of the absurd “fact check” that the then-president was “musing.” Trump was merely quizzing then-coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx during a relatively lighthearted briefing about potential treatments for what was then a novel disease which the medical community was mobilizing to fight.
He never advocated for shooting up Clorox.
CNN and the rest of the activist media used the non-controversy to grab headlines while a valuable conversation about enjoying the benefits of sunshine was lost in the fold.
With the nonsense of having to add missing context to the CNN “fact check” aside, the network summarized that Trump’s comments about the sun’s rays potentially neutralizing the virus were hopeless and dumb and not to be taken seriously. The network even dragged out a doctor to push its opposition to Trump on the matter of UV rays and contagious illnesses.
“Going out in the sun or exposing yourself to these high-intensity UV lamps is not going to protect you from Covid-19,” Dr. Megan Ranney told CNN. “I don’t want people to think that this is another miracle cure.”
Trump merely commented on the power of UVB rays from the sun apparently relying on common sense and what he’d been hearing from the scientific community about the promise of UV light. He also said it in the context of people going outside — where you’re believed to find more relative safety from most contagious illnesses.
UC Santa Barbara and other schools tested the light theory against simulated saliva with the viruses, and found, so far, that UV rays are a powerful force against microscopic germs — vindicating at the very least Trump’s curiosity on the matter after nearly a year.