Piers Morgan and Nigel Farage furiously clashed during Good Morning Britain’s coverage of the US election on Wednesday over Donald Trump’s handling of coronavirus.
The presenter, who has been a critic of the way Trump has dealt with the pandemic, slammed the president for his “nonsensical cure theories”, claiming Trump had referred to “bleach, and so on”.
Piers was referring to comments Trump made back in April, when he falsely claimed disinfectant could “knock out [the virus] in a minute”.
“One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Is there a way we can do something like that by injection, inside, or almost a cleaning?” he asked.
However, Farage rejected Piers’ recounting of Trump’s comments, telling him: “End this nonsense – he never mentioned bleach, Piers. Do not allow your viewers to believe that untruth.”
“We literally all heard him Nigel, what are you talking about?” Piers argued.
“Are you seriously telling me that he said ‘bleach’?” Farage said.
Susanna Reid interjected, saying: “Do you not remember?”
“You are wrong, wrong, wrong,” Farage insisted. “You are talking utter rubbish.
“And on his handling of the crisis, he closed the flights and stopped the flights coming in from China and other countries that carry the infection whilst we continued an open door at Heathrow airpot.”
He added: “Now I’m not saying that everything he said about this is right, but he did lock down America, tried his best to stop the virus from coming in.”
Back in April, senior US officials immediately clarified that there were no plans to inject disinfectant into Americans and experts lambasted the idea wholesale after Trump said it “sounded interesting” to him.
Pulmonologist Dr Vin Gupta told NBC News: “This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it’s dangerous.”
England’s deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries ridiculed the suggestion, saying during a Downing Street briefing: “Certainly nobody should be injecting anything and we should be using evidence-based and properly trialled treatments that we know will be safe.”
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.