In the months since US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned chlorine dioxide during his Senate confirmation hearing, the online community advocating for the use of the toxic bleach solution as a cure for everything from malaria to autism has become emboldened. Activity on bleach-supporting social media groups is exploding, and influencers are reemerging in an effort to push President Donald Trump’s administration to approve bleach as a mainstream treatment.
“We are thrilled that RFK Jr. is in charge,” Michelle Herman, who sells a nasal spray containing chlorine dioxide and says she’s discussed the topic with Kennedy, tells WIRED. She was pictured, along with other bleach enthusiasts and activists, at the recent Truth Seekers conference held at Trump’s Doral resort in Florida.
Chlorine dioxide is sold under a variety of names, including Miracle Mineral Solution, Chlorine Dioxide Solution, Water Purification Solution, and God’s Detox. Whatever name it goes by, it has been promoted as a cure for a wide array of ailments since the mid-1990s, and despite prosecutions and warnings from authorities it continues to be popular in many parts of the world. It has been peddled as a “cure” for everything from malaria to cancer, from HIV to autism to Covid-19. (There is no credible evidence to back up any of the claims that chlorine dioxide can cure any of these ailments.)
While Kennedy has a long history of promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, he has not explicitly promoted chlorine dioxide as a treatment. However, in January, during his Senate confirmation hearing, he referenced chlorine dioxide while praising Trump for “looking at all of the different remedies” for Covid, using it as an example of the open-mindedness that Kennedy characterized as a “demonstration of leadership.”
Since Kennedy mentioned chlorine dioxide, groups dedicated to chlorine dioxide use on platforms like Telegram and Facebook are filled with new members and increased activity. (Telegram did not respond to a request for comment; Meta said it was reviewing the groups WIRED flagged and would remove any it determines violate the company’s policies.) Activists who have spent years fighting to highlight the dangers of chlorine dioxide are now deeply concerned that the Trump administration could seek to approve its use as a cure for a wide variety of ills.
“The bleachers are back, making connections with powerful people, reaching RFK and Trump,” says Fiona O’Leary, an Ireland-based activist who has autistic children and has spent years trying to highlight the dangers of toxic bleach solutions being sold as an autism cure. “Bleachers want RFK to approve chlorine dioxide as a treatment for autism, cancer, and other conditions. It is like watching a horror show.”
Kennedy, according to chlorine dioxide advocates, has been interested in their cause dating back to at least 2023.
Days after the confirmation hearing, Pierre Kory—a physician and one of the main promoters of ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, despite there being no credible evidence to back up the claim—claimed on a podcast that Kennedy had called him to discuss the use of bleach ahead of the hearing.
“Bobby thought they were going to come after him on that,” Kory told the Royce White: Call Me Crazy podcast. “So I basically told Bobby what the real story was on it.” Kory, who has appeared alongside Kennedy multiple times, including at a “Defeat the Mandates” protest in 2022, added that the health secretary “called me his hero; he’s my hero.”
Kory, who has written about chlorine dioxide repeatedly on his Substack in recent months and is allegedly writing a book entitled War on Chlorine Dioxide, did not respond to a request for comment. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment about his links to Kory, but the health secretary has praised the doctor on social media, calling him a “brave dissident doctor” and “honest, brave, and sincere.”
Kennedy’s interest, though, appears to stretch back further. Herman says that she met Kennedy in October 2023. “I was honored to meet him in late 2023 and was able to talk with him for about 30 minutes,” Herman tells WIRED. “I shared that, very similar to the war on ivermectin, the war on chlorine dioxide was the same story … He listened intently, indicated he was not familiar with it, but was nonetheless very intrigued and asked for more information.”
Herman claimed while speaking on a livestream organized by David Oates, the administrator of the popular Chorine Dioxide Testimonies channel on Telegram, that she wrote an email to Kennedy after his confirmation telling him that “chlorine dioxide must be included in the national conversation about health care.” In the channel, users share details of the concerning side effects they experience after taking the solution. (“Urgent! By mistake I took 30 drops of sodium chlorite in a cup of water” one member wrote last month, referencing one of the active ingredients in chlorine dioxide solution. “I am feeling nausea and vomiting-like feeling. I have taken a glass of milk and a couple of glasses of water. Also I have called [an] ambulance. Could anyone advise on what to do?”)
Oates is one of the influencers who appeared at the Doral event. His Telegram channel is a platform to sell his own chlorine dioxide solution, which he brands as God’s Detox, and to promote his one-on-one private phone consultation service, for which he charges $100 an hour. “I can provide you protocols to detox the body based on the named disease,” Oates says on the website where he advertises the service. He did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, one of the most notorious figures within the bleaching community has reemerged. Mark Grenon was sentenced to a stint in federal prison in 2023 alongside three of his sons for selling bleach as a cure for Covid. A self-styled archbishop of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, Grenon was released from prison in September 2024, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
While Grenon initially told a supporter on Facebook that he was “not allowed” to become part of groups promoting chlorine dioxide, he has appeared on numerous podcasts and livestreams in recent months to promote the use of bleach. An individual with the username Mark_Grenon is also now listed as an administrator of Oates’ Chlorine Dioxide Testimonies Telegram group, which has more than 30,000 members.
In one question-and-answer session hosted on Zoom related to “curing” cancer with chlorine dioxide last week, which was reviewed by WIRED, Grenon told those listening that chlorine dioxide is “growing worldwide.”
In another recent online interview, Grenon claimed a member of his church treated a 4-month-old baby with liver cancer by soaking them in a bath of water topped up with 100 drops of chlorine dioxide.
Grenon hung up on WIRED when contacted last week, saying he doesn’t trust any reporters. In a follow-up text message, when asked if he was breaching the conditions of his supervised release, Grenon said his probation officer knew what he was doing, adding, “President Trump has made it very clear that no law enforcement agency can restrict freedom of speech. Look up his executive orders. In the US we are guaranteed that.” (His probation officer did not respond to requests for comment.)
Last month, Grenon attended the Truth Seekers conference at Trump’s resort, which was filled with bleach enthusiasts and antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Grenon was pictured at the event alongside Herman and Oates as well as Kerri Rivera, who has long promoted chlorine dioxide as a treatment for autism. Rivera has been living in Mexico in recent years; previously, German authorities investigated accusations that she had caused bodily harm to a child, though no charges were ultimately filed. Riviera did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Andreas Kalcker, another bleach activist, was also at the conference. Kalcker was charged by authorities in Argentina in 2021 following the death of a 5-year-old boy whose parents gave him Kalcker’s chlorine dioxide solution with the belief that it would ward off Covid.
In an interview published recently on Rumble, Kalcker said he once met Kennedy at the AutismOne conference in Chicago in 2013 where they were both speakers. “While we were both speakers at the same conference in Chicago over a decade ago, I have had no direct relationship or contact with Mr. Kennedy,” Kalcker tells WIRED.
For years, a central aim of some chlorine dioxide advocates has been to remove a key warning about chlorine dioxide issued by the US Food and Drug Administration in August 2019, during Trump’s first term in office. It was viewed as a significant block to more widespread adoption of the treatment by doctors.
“The solution,” the news release read, “when mixed, develops into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.”
“RFK has to rescind that FDA warning against chlorine dioxide,” said Herman during a March livestream on Rumble, an alternative video sharing platform. “That’s what stops everybody in their tracks. Every doctor, no matter how much guts they have, they see that warning and they get nervous, they get scared … that’s got to be rescinded.”
Over the weekend, Kalcker posted on Facebook, asking Kennedy to revise the government’s warning about chlorine dioxide. It was, though, already gone: The FDA warning was last live on the agency’s site on May 15, according to an archived version of the site available on the Internet Archive. “News releases on FDA.gov are archived via content lifecycle standards,” Andrew Nixon, director of communications at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), tells WIRED. “Two years of content are kept on the active site, which is why that is now archived.”
Many other FDA releases from around the same time were indeed also archived over the course of the past month. Other pages that are similarly old have not been archived, and there are still several posts on the FDA site which warn against chlorine dioxide—including one outlining the prosecution of members of the Grenon family for selling the bleach solution as a Covid cure.
Nixon tells WIRED that “there is not any new FDA action and the general public health position on [chlorine dioxide] being dangerous has not changed.”
Herman did not say whether Kennedy or anyone at HHS had responded to her March email calling for the warning to be removed, and Kennedy did not respond to a WIRED request for comment about the email.
“I don’t know if it is a website error or if it was purposely removed,” she says of the warning, “but I’ll hope for the latter.”
Other proponents of the toxic solution clearly view the removal of the warning as a victory.
“I was genuinely surprised, and as someone from China, I couldn’t imagine our own government quietly removing a public warning without any announcement,” Xuewu Liu, who promotes the treatment of cancerous tumors by directly injecting them with chlorine dioxide, tells WIRED. “This quiet removal won’t immediately change everything, but it opens a door.”
Liu, who has been promoted by Kory in the past, wrote about the removal on Substack on Saturday; within hours, Kalcker, Herman, and Oates were all sharing the news on their social channels.
While the removal of the warning is a huge boon for those promoting the toxic bleach solution, it is just the first step in a push to make chlorine dioxide a mainstream treatment. In her livestream interview in March, Herman said she suggested that someone hold a “Make America Healthy Again roundtable” to discuss chlorine dioxide, while getting the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct research into chlorine dioxide and setting standards for the toxic solution.
“We know that there is awareness and support for repurposed drugs and what are termed ‘alternative’ therapies, and we hope that the restraints and prosecutions will cease,” Herman tells WIRED of her hopes for the Trump administration. “Will they outright approve these therapies? We just don’t know. More realistically, they will hopefully encourage further evaluations towards such approvals.”
“I and other activists, scientists, have been speaking out against this lethal bleach product for more than a decade now,” says O’Leary, the Ireland-based activist. “When chlorine dioxide is ingested, it causes serious, life-threatening illness.”
