The pressure’s on to get Americans to fly again: As the novel coronavirus put a serious dent in air travel, airlines are warning they plan to cut tens of thousands of workers.  But the Environmental Protection Agency’s big announcement this week that it gave emergency approval to a disinfectant it said would kill the virus on surfaces for up to a week — with American Airlines and two Texas sports clinics being the first to try it — is being panned by some health and chemical experts.

They “say the cleanser might actually harm passengers and flight attendants and do little to protect against the virus, which is mainly transmitted through the air in closed spaces,” my colleagues Steven Mufson and Meryl Kornfield report.  “It would be great if this was a miracle solution, but it’s not,” Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told my colleagues. “There’s plenty of risk here and too much we don’t know about how this chemical could actually harm people.”

An American Airlines plane. (Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images)
An American Airlines plane. (Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images)

The announcement, coming the week of the Republican National Convention, illustrates how the Trump administration especially as the election nears is eager to fast-track possible solutions to reopening and tout them as major breakthroughs. Andrew Wheeler, the EPA’s administrator, called the disinfectant — SurfaceWise2, made by Dallas-based Allied BioScience and reportedly applied electrostatically to surfaces — “a major game-changing announcement.”

And on Sunday, on the eve of the convention, President Trump announced the Food and Drug Administration is granting emergency authorization of convalescent plasma for covid-19. Yet the details of this announcement from the FDA were also disputed by scientists, and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn later corrected his dubious statement that 35 out of 100 people suffering from covid-19 were saved by the injection of antibody-rich plasma.