A controversial Sephardic rabbi in the United States has claimed that claimed that using “hot hair-blowers” to heat up the throat was a “guaranteed” cure for coronavirus. 

Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi recommended blowing “hot air into your throat, for about half a minute, twenty seconds, until you feel that your throat gets very very hot inside” five times a day for two days for confirmed cases, and twice a day for suspected cases. 

He claimed that this had been proven “by experiment” and that this technique would “kill the virus immediately. 

“It’s dead and it’s guaranteed,” he continued, “There are other ways, but it’s not guaranteed. This is guaranteed.”

He went on to say that sufferers were “dreaming” if they thought that hospitals could cure them, alleging that doctors in Israel were turning people away because they were fearful of catching the virus themselves. 

The American-Israeli rabbi made the statements during an online sermon broadcast to his followers over his website. 

Rabbi Mizrachi is a controversial Sephardic rabbi, based in Monsey, New York, who has been described by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis as a “Jewish hate-preacher” for his views on the Holocaust. 

In 2019, the Home Office reportedly intervened to block Rabbi Mizrachi from entering the UK for a planned speaking tour of London and Manchester. It had also been suggested that the Home Office considered a ban on his entry to the UK in 2015. 

Rabbi Mizrachi claimed that the Chief Rabbi and senior Sephardi Rabbi Joseph Dweck were responsible for the Home Office's reported intervention in March last year, claiming that they were “gay lovers who do everything they can to promote homosexuality and destroy the Jewish nation from inside.” 

Rabbi Mizrachi, has also previously claimed that autism and Down’s Syndrome were punishments for the sins of a past life, and that the Holocaust was the result of “assimilating” Ashkenazi Jews.  

In December 2015, he also said that only a million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust as “80 per cent of the Jewish people were assimilated or intermarried with non-Jews.”