Fact checker busts GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert for hyping nonexistent ‘magic powder’ that purportedly kills COVID-19 instantly

A professional fact checker recently brought the hammer down on Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) for promoting a nonexistent “mist” that he claims is capable of instantly killing COVID-19.

In a fact-check piece published in the Houston Chronicle, PolitiFact’s Madlin Mekelburg picks apart Gohmert for hyping up a miracle treatment for COVID-19 that he falsely claimed was being used to protect health care workers in Germany.

“It is being used in Germany as a mist,” Gohmert said in an interview with a local Texas news station earlier this month. “Health care workers go through a misting tent going into the hospital and it kills the coronavirus completely dead not only right then, but any time in the next 14 days that the virus touches anything that’s been sprayed it is killed.”

But Dr. Jörn Wegner, the head of the German Hospital Association, tells Mekelburg that literally nothing about Gohmert’s claim is true.

“What your congressman said is absolute nonsense,” he explained. “There are no such tents and there’s no powder or magical cure.”

And Thomas Ruttkowski, the spokesman for the German Society of Hospital Hygiene, literally laughed at Gohmert when told about his claim.

“I’m sorry, but we did not heard (sic) about that magic powder,” he wrote in an email to Mekelburg. “Thank you for your mail… Finally, something to laugh about.”