‘Vaccine Police’ Founder Claims Drinking Your Own Urine Is Covid-19 Antidote

What’s the latest anti-vaxxer Covid-19 antidote? Well, urine for a surprise.

Yes, Christopher Key, who maintains the “Vaccine Police” anti-vaxx website, is apparently now touting urine therapy. In this case, urine therapy is not sitting down with a jug of your urine and talking about its feelings. Instead, it’s drinking your own urine, because why not, right? After all, it seems like various anti-vaxxers have been trying to convince you to do basically anything besides get the Covid-19 vaccines.

In a video posted on his Telegram account, Keys suggested putting into your mouth what normally goes into the toilet. Just take a look at the clip of the video accompanying the following tweet from Tom Osinski, MD, who incidentally is a urology resident at the University of Rochester Medical Center:

As you can see, this clip started off with Key telling his audience, “We have the antidote. And the antidote is even for those who’ve been vaccinated.” Then before revealing what this “antidote” may be, he prefaced the big reveal with a few other statements such as “they’re going to tear me apart, but hey they tear me apart all time” and “when I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt, but go do the research.” Incidentally, urine does tend to have some sodium in it, but that may not have been the “grain of salt” that he was alluding to in his statement.

Key eventually got to his key urine punch line with: “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy.”

He continued with “OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need.”

Key tried to support his assertion by saying, “This has been around for centuries,” which is the same thing that you could say about body lice, toe fungus, and sloth dung. He also mentioned “research” and “peer-reviewed publications on urine,” without offering much more specifics on these. It would have been helpful to hear more about this supposed research and how the studies were designed since it’s not easy to find such “pee-reviewed” studies in the scientific literature. For example, a PubMed search for “urine therapy” and “Covid-19” today returned zero results, which is exactly the same number of results that you get when you search for “I am a gigantic egg carton.”

A piece by Zachary Petrizzo for The Daily Beast included a longer version of the Telegram video. There you can hear Key claim that “this vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” and “I drink my own urine.” Ah, there you go, calling the Covid-19 vaccines that have been authorized and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a “bioweapon,” while telling people to drink their own urine.

OK, before you blindly start treating your bladder like a expresso machine, you should have lot of questions. In other words, mind your pees and Q’s. I’ve already covered for Forbes why you shouldn’t have a cow and consume cow dung or urine in an attempt to prevent or treat Covid-19. As I mentioned, cow dung and urine can have harmful pathogens such as ringworm and nasty E. coli.  Now you may argue that you are different from a cow. You may say that unlike a cow you can log on to Facebook and that your urine is different and sterile. Isn’t that what the Patches O’Houlihan character insisted in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story:

Well, here’s a shocker. Don’t get your urinary science from a Hollywood movie, even one that focuses on balls. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology showed that your urine may not be a sterile as you think. Samples of urine from women had 85 different species of bacteria. And, spoiler alert. The presence of bacteria means that it’s not sterile.

Microbes aren’t the only problem. Urine contains waste products as well. Your kidneys form urine to get rid of waste from your body. These aren’t all necessarily “toxins” as the following tweet calls them:

But, in general, it’s not a good idea to drink what your kidneys worked so hard to get rid of in the first place. Think about it. You don’t scrub food debris off of your dishes, throw the debris in the trash can, take the trash out onto the sidewalk, and then next morning bring the debris back into your kitchen in order to make an omelet. At least, you don’t do that and continue to have friends. Re-ingesting waste products from your urine may not be immediately harmful. Over time, though, doing so can end up overtaxing your kidneys. This would be akin to trapping your kidneys in a Groundhog’s Day situation, where it continues to see the same waste over and over again.

You may have noticed the hashtag #UrineIdiot on the tweet above and swirling around Twitter after Key’s video hit social media like urine in a toilet. Soon there were mentions of things like “wee the people”, “wee my Valentine”, and “trickle-down” theories. The Ivy League of Comedy’s comedian Shaun Eli Briedbart quipped, “I’d love to see the list of the other ‘beverages’ they tried before they opted for urine.” He also joked that “drinking urine may help alleviate any toilet paper shortages.”

Yeah, it may not be a great idea to tell your significant other after a bathroom trip, “by the way, to conserve toilet paper, I decided to drink my urine instead.” And no, it probably won’t make things better by replacing “my” with “other people’s,” in this case. There’s no real scientific evidence that drinking urine will protect you against Covid-19 in any way. That’s, of course, assuming that people don’t social distance from you when they hear that you drink urine. At the same, time drinking urine is not one of those “totally harmless” things that you can just do for the heck of it.

Plus, this whole “drink you own urine” is yet another thing that detracts from the real evidence-based ways of preventing Covid-19 and the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) such as vaccination and face mask wearing. Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a seemingly steady flow of bogus antidotes and treatments that have not been backed by science. Such snake oil-esque could fill a store that no one would want to go in non-pandemic times. When you’ve got people thinking of drinking urine instead of getting vaccinated, you’ve got more than just wee bit of a problem.