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.”