Splendid news, everyone! Come on out of your house and book a heavy breathing session somewhere fancy, because coronavirus is cured! The church where Donald Trump will be holding his rally event in Arizona — it is called DREAM CITY CHURCH — has announced it has invested in these doohickeys, and they are air filters, and according to church leadership, the air filter doohickeys remove 99.9 percent of all the corona loogies from the air.

The senior pastor of the church, and also its chief operating officer (COO), made the science announcement:

You are probably wondering how the miracle air filters work, because you ask too many questions instead of just trusting in the Lord and his messengers, Pastor Luke Barnett and COO Brendan Zastrow.

The answer is simple. First you mash up a big hydroxychloroquine cookie and you fling it into the air, which has been suffused with Lysol and tanning bed rays, and LOL we are kidding, that is not how it works.

BARNETT: We're probably the first person in the nation to ...

ZASTROW: Yeah, we've installed CleanAir EXP, we have a local Arizona company, it was technology developed by some members of our church, and we've installed these units, and it kills 99.9 percent of COVID within 10 minutes, through independent testing.

BARNETT: Yeah. It's the ionization, is that what it is?

ZASTROW: Io-ni-zy-cin. It's io-ni-zy-shin. Of the air. And it takes particulates out, and COVID cannot live in that environment.

BARNETT: So when you come into our auditorium, 99 percent of COVID is GONE. Killed. If it was there in the first place!

Oh God bless Jesus, this is wonderful!

Of course, every time Christ uses one of His sheep to do a miracle, there's always a Godless Agenda Doer ready to piss on it, like "Yeah probably not," and Talking Points Memo found some. Steal our joy, Linsey Marr, Virginia Tech professor who specializes in how diseases spread through the air:

"They can reduce the background level, but that doesn't help when we're in close proximity to others," she told TPM. [...]

"It may kill [coronavirus] within 10 minutes, but it has to get there first," Marr said of the purification system.

Marr illustrated her point with an example, and we hope we paraphrase it correctly while adding our trademark Wonkette sass to it. She's saying, OK, you have two people next to each other at the Jesus Trump rally at DREAM CITY, and one of them has the COVID and the other one doesn't. So Aunt COVID coughs, and in order for the purifier to work, her droplets would have to travel all the way to the air purifier, and then get bug-zapped, before they land on the person right next to her.

Is that how that all works? Is it like a heavenly bug-zapper for Jesus? It is not, according to Marr.

"When I'm in a crowd and I'm close to people, I'm going to end up breathing their exhalations before they have a chance to get to that purifier and come back," she said, adding that no air purification system would be able to prevent transmission "between people who are in a crowded environment."

That's a bummer. Is there any way for this Arizona event to go off safely?

The only hope on that front, she added, is "if they get pranked again" and no one actually shows up to the event.

LOLOL, it's funny because that happened.

Another scientist commented — somewhere else, we forget, must we do everything for you? — that the only way something like this might work is if every single person somehow had their own magic air filter. Perhaps they could fashion them into hats. Maybe something in a nice tin foil or something? We don't know, we will have to let the Lord's fashion experts figure that out.

As TPM notes, the event is for Students for Trump, and there might be 3,000 people there, including some of Congress's biggest idiots, like GOP Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Jody Hice of Georgia. On top of that, the governors of Arizona and also for some reason Missouri are supposed to show up and swap spit too.

If you want to read more science about what a garbage fucking idea this is, and how the sorts of lab tests companies do on these things don't tend to end up quite with the same results when it's put into a real-live situation, click on over to TPM.

We are sure it'll all be fine, though. Or maybe they'll all give each other the plague and Arizona's coronavirus situation will be even fuckeder than it already is.

Que sera and shit!

[Talking Points Memo]

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