ICYMI: GOP Hopeful Herschel Walker Pushes Snake Oil Body Spray for COVID and Refuses to Share Vaccination Status While Trump Says Politicians Who Won’t Confirm Receiving COVID-19 Shot are “Gutless”

Today, the Daily Beast is reporting that Trump-tapped Senate candidate Herschel Walker pushed a “snake oil body spray for COVID” to his followers, swearing by this “EPA-, FDA-approved,” “dry mist” product that — “as you walk through the door” — [would] “kill any COVID on your body.” 

Walker is still refusing to disclose whether or not he’s received the COVID-19 vaccine, but Walker’s biggest benefactor Donald Trump is now saying that politicians who won’t confirm receiving the COVID-19 shot are “gutless” and that “the vaccine saved tens of millions of people throughout the world.”

Read the new report on Walker’s latest COVID-19 fiasco below:

GOP Hopeful Herschel Walker Pushed Snake Oil Body Spray for COVID

Daily Beast, 1/12/22

• Herschel Walker pushed an unnamed body spray to kill COVID. Too bad that doesn’t actually exist.

• Pro football star turned Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker will not say whether he has been vaccinated. But in Walker’s mind, he may not need the shot.

• That’s because, months before the vaccine was available, Walker was swearing by—and encouraging others to use—unproven mystery treatments, including an allegedly FDA-approved “dry mist” that will “kill any COVID on your body.”

• In an August 2020 interview with right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck, Walker hyped two unspecified aerosol COVID prophylactics. One was the aforementioned “dry mist,” for use in an interior environment; the other was some sort of “spray.”

• Walker dropped the big news unprompted about 40 minutes into the interview, amid a discussion of law enforcement, beginning by telling Beck that he “probably shouldn’t tell you.”

• “Do you know right now, I have something that [you can bring] into a building, that will clean you of COVID, as you walk through this, this dry mist?” Walker asks.

• “As you walk through the door, it will kill any COVID on your body,” he continues. He leans in and adds, “EPA-, FDA-approved.”

• That claim would seem to indicate that the mystery treatment is an existing product. While there are obviously disinfectant sprays that are FDA-approved, no spray has been proven to stop the transmission of the airborne coronavirus. Walker’s claims seem to be based on nothing. Beck does a double-take, but the football icon isn’t done.

• “When you leave—it will kill the virus as you leave, this here product,” Walker says. He adds that he has a second unspecified miracle product, a “spray” possibly indicated for use after the dry mist treatment.

• “They don’t want to talk about that. They don’t want to hear about that,” Walker says. “And I’m serious.”

• The bizarre proposal echoes the famous pitch of Walker’s longtime friend Donald Trump, who spitballed the unscientific and dangerous internal use of disinfectants to prevent COVID in a televised press conference just a few months before Walker’s interview.

• “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” the former commander-in-chief said at the time.

• (In the days after the press conference, poison control centers reported a spike in calls about accidental poisonings.)

• Like Trump, Walker—whose own experimental aerosol treatment appears to have been for external use only—is on a political tightrope when it comes to the vaccine.

• Walker, 59, has declined multiple times to say whether he has been vaccinated, as recently as December. The Olympian bobsledder has previously expressed a general aversion to medicine, writing in a 2008 memoir about his dissociative identity disorder that he has “not taken any kind of medication in my life with the exception of a few mild over-the-counter pain relievers.”

• In October, the Heisman winner had to cancel a fundraising event hosted by a donor whose Twitter profile featured an image of syringes in the shape of a swastika. (A Walker spokesperson initially defended the image as not being anti-vaccine, but “clearly an anti-mandatory vaccination graphic,” adding that “Herschel unequivocally opposes antisemitism and bigotry of all kinds.”)

• The prior month, Walker expressed support for Nicki Minaj, whose apocryphal claim that the vaccine caused her cousin to develop swollen testicles had gone viral.

• “Hey @NICKIMINAJ, It’s always okay to ask questions. It should be encouraged to be inquisitive in order to make sure we’re putting our country’s best interest at heart,” Walker tweeted. “Thank you for speaking out!!!”

• Walker’s campaign spokesperson did not reply to questions about his vaccination status, what the aerosol products were, exactly, or whether he had used them personally.

“From advertising snake oil solutions for COVID-19 and excusing anti-vaccine propaganda to refusing to admit if he’s received the shot in the first place, Herschel Walker has proven he’s unfit for public office in the midst of a public health crisis,” said Dan Gottlieb, spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia.