MMS (Miracle Mineral Solution)
Used as a religious sacrament by the Genesis II Church
Alleged to cure at least 95% of all known diseases, including
Alzheimer’s Disease, cancers, autism, skin rashes and
infections including HIV and COVID
It does cure people of the money they spend for it
Humans like fake medicines and always have. That includes some highly educated and medically trained and experienced professionals who should know better. Go figure. We’re a superstitious lot. Or less charitably, we’re sometimes just plain dumb.
Recent articles by the BBC and Bloomberg Businessweek focus on a fake medicine sometimes called MMS. It is toxic and has poisoned unknown thousands of people across dozens of countries and killed an unknown number of others. MMS is most commonly made by mixing solutions containing the swimming pool chemicals hydrochloric acid and sodium chlorite. The mixture produces the bleaching compound chlorine dioxide (ClO2 -- one chlorine atom, two oxygen atoms), which is the main ingredient in MMS. Side effects of ingesting too much chlorine dioxide include severe vomiting, diarrhea, liver failure, irreparable damage to the respiratory tract and critical organs and death.
The humble origins of MMS
MMS was discovered in 2006 by Jim Humble, a former scientologist who published a book touting it as helping to cure malaria. Humble is an important deity. He said that he is a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy who asked for, and got, the job of being put in charge of taking care of Earth.
Clearly, he was off his game as a god when he let the ex-president get into office in the 2020 elections. But that's a different story.
As one might expect when thousands of people are being poisoned, MMS started attracting attention from health authorities. It first gained popularity among health crackpots like antivaxxers, mouth breathers and knuckle draggers. Stories of bad side-effects were starting to pop up. The FDA published its first warning about it in 2010. That’s when the MMS story starts to get interesting.
In a blog post in 2010, Humble wrote about a way to evade and get rid of pesky health authorities: “Forming a church of health and healing. If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don’t want, from forced insurance, and from many things that a government might want to use to oppress us.”
Humble, along with Mark Grenon (a Florida resident), created the Genesis II church (GII, not to be confused with the other GII, Germaine II). Grenon, became one MMS’s top promoters. Grenon was himself an interesting person in his own right. In 2016, a news report showed Grenon spewing conspiratorial falsities at a GII church event. Grenon’s crackpottery included blither about the 11 September planes being “holograms created by the government”, and drivel about “chemtrails” being poisonous.
Anyway, taking MMS became a formal GII religious sacrament and thus, according to Humble and Grenon, not subject to regulations or laws. Taking poison was part of GII’s religious freedom and, as a bonus, an escape from government oppression. Through its website in 2019, GII was selling MMS in a “G2 Sacramental Kit” with a note on the enclosed bottle of MMS capsules that stated: “As water needs to be cleansed for health, so must the water of the body, the blood and its tissues be cleansed to maintain health—Archbishop Mark Grenon.”
Apparently, Grenon moved up the GII church hierarchy to Archbishop status. The god Humble was out of the picture after he split with Grenon in 2015 because he was not getting his full share of the profits from MMS sales.
The church’s logo, a globe with a golden GII garland was part of the property record. Apparently, sometime after the exit of the god from the enterprise, selling MMS had become the Grenon family business. MMS was sold in 4-ounce bottles as “sacramental cleansing water,” for $20 donations paid to the church.
In 2009, American retiree Doug Nash and his Mexican wife, Sylvia Fink, embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe aboard their sailboat, Windcastle. On their way to the Solomon Islands, they met a couple, a Belgian man and an American woman, who sold MMS to Fink as a prophylaxis against malaria. On an August morning, after a night of dancing with villagers on the remote island of Epi to celebrate an annual canoe race, Fink added 2 drops of MMS to 10 drops of lime juice and drank the mixture on the boat’s sundeck. Within 15 minutes, she’d started vomiting uncontrollably, continuing until she was throwing up only bile. She also suffered burning urinary pain. Nash radioed for medical assistance, but by sundown Fink had lapsed into a coma. By 9 p.m. she was dead.
The autopsy report noted a significantly high level of methemoglobin in the blood—a symptom of high exposure to chlorite—which would have effectively starved her body of oxygen. “It was a substance, used in the fashion that was being recommended, that was definitely acting like a poison would on your gut,” Nash says of the MMS. “Her body got so dehydrated that her organs started to fail.”
Now in his late 80s, Nash relocated aboard the Windcastle to Honolulu, where he’s writing a book about his wife’s death. He recalls Grenon mocking the incident in early podcasts and even suggesting Nash was somehow to blame. “He’s a crude, vile, dishonest person,” Nash says while discussing Grenon’s arrest. “I have no idea what the penalty should be for what he did, peddling an industrial chemical that’s very dangerous if you use it incorrectly. But he deserves to be punished.”
Fink’s death resonated enough in Oceania that when Grenon and Humble went to Australia and New Zealand to host a dozen seminars five years later, seeking to market MMS as a cure for Ebola, which was then spreading in West Africa, some legs of their tour were shut down by local governments. From 2009 to 2014, the Victorian Poisons Information Centre had attributed at least 10 poisonings in Australia, including four that required hospitalization, to MMS. In one particularly serious case from April 2009, a woman had been fined for injecting cancer sufferers with MMS in her garage, advising them not to seek chemotherapy and charging them as much as $2,000 per shot; one breast cancer patient had to be treated for a life-threatening blood clot afterward. While Grenon and Humble were in New Zealand, lawmakers were seeking to pass a bill that would help regulators ban products such as MMS, but it eventually stalled out.
MMS kept spreading, largely away from the public eye despite the 16,000 chlorine dioxide poisonings taking place in the U.S. from 2014 to 2019. The exact percentage that can be traced directly to MMS is unknown, though in one notable instance from 2017, an autistic 6-year-old girl was hospitalized with liver failure after her parents gave it to her. Genesis II held that, over time, it trained 2,000 ministers globally and sold millions of vials of MMS to members and to online buyers transacting through Amazon.com and EBay. Church-branded MMS hasn’t been listed on those websites since the Grenons’ arrest, but several imitations with names such as “Jim Humble’s Formula” are still available for purchase.
Archbishop Grenon and/or some of his offspring units are in jail in Florida awaiting trial. The arrests were in 2020. It doesn't faze the Archbishop. He points out that thousands of people worldwide have paid him ~$800 each to be trained in hot to make MMS and what “dosages” are to be used for what diseases. MMS is still available all over the place, apparently including the US.
During the COVID pandemic GII’s sales were more than $100,000/month. Grenon claimed in a March 2020 GII newsletter that MMS could stop the COVID. Federal agent Rivera another MMS order. The instructions advised people infected with COVID to ingest “one 6-drop dose of MMS, then one hour later take another 6-drop dose of MMS. After two 6-drop doses of MMS, go on hourly doses of 3 activated drops in 4 ounces of water hourly. For children, follow the same instructions as above and cut the amounts in half.”
The plot thickens - the idiot president blunders into the steaming pile
The story gets really interesting after the ex-president stumbled into the steaming MMS pile. Our idiot ex-resident appears to have helped to boost MMS sales after he blithered in public about using bleach to treat COVID. Where did the idiot get that idea? Probably from Grenon. Bloomberg notes that QAnon was circulating conspiracy theories and testimonials for bleach-based cures were, especially among vaccine-skeptic circles. But GII probably played a role. The Archbishop took credit for the idiot’s COVID bleach blither. Less than a week before the idiot spoke to the public about it, Grenon said, as Bloomberg puts it,
.... on his weekly webcast that he’d written to the president about his legal problems, describing MMS as ‘a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body’ and ‘rid the body of Covid-19.’ After Trump’s endorsement Grenon claimed, without evidence, that the president had received bleach from more than two dozen church supporters and that Genesis II had a channel to him through a Trump family member.”
On a podcast that same month, Grenon declared that he had no intention of complying with the government’s efforts to shut him down. He also offered a warning, invoking the constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to bear arms. “You’ve got the Second, right?” he said. “When Congress does immoral things, passes immoral laws, that’s when you pick up guns, right? You want a Waco? Do they want a Waco?” he said, referring to the 1993 U.S. government siege of a Texas religious sect’s headquarters that left 86 people dead.
The entire MMS thing is clearly a complete fraud, but a toxic one. Nonetheless Americans still buy it, not knowing it is a poison, or not believing it is when they are told. MMS users in the US tend to be into things like crackpot QAnon conspiracies. MMS users in foreign countries tend to be poor, uninformed about fraud and maybe also big fans of crackpot conspiracies. Thousands of foreigners are still being poisoned in dozens of countries. The BBC article comments on the MMS situation in South America:
Chlorine dioxide, the apparent cure they [protesters in Lima Peru] were clamoring for, is not only ineffective against Covid-19, but it can cause life-threatening dehydration and acute liver failure. It is considered hazardous for human consumption by health authorities all over the world, including those in Peru. Its promoters have had face-offs with doctors and have even been prosecuted by authorities for years, but the coronavirus pandemic gave them their biggest showcase so far.
Interest in chlorine dioxide on Google skyrocketed in 2020, and hundreds of pages offering it began to appear in social media. Several celebrities endorsed it in their social media profiles, and some even managed to win mainstream media coverage by praising of its alleged properties. Andreas Kalcker, one of its biggest promoters, has been invited to talk about it by well-meaning journalists, legislators and academics not only in Peru, but also in neighboring countries such as Colombia and Bolivia.
"The narrative of fake cures is fed by hope, by this idea that 'we finally found the solution'," says Laura Merchan, a researcher from the Democracy Observatory in the University of the Andes in Bogota, who studied how false information about fake cures spread on Facebook in Colombia.
Other chlorine dioxide enthusiasts are also keen on conspiratorial thinking, like Luis Lopez, from Peru. While talking to the BBC, he said he believed public health measures like mandatory masks make people sick, and that the whole pandemic is an effort to depopulate the Earth.
Lopez tells me the pandemic forced him to close his business, so he took on manufacturing and selling the substance "because it works". He says he makes the equivalent of £580 ($820) in a good day, more than three times the monthly minimum wage in his country.
Another plausible explanation might have to do with how conspiracy theories exploit reasoning errors we are all prone to make. Van der Linden explains that "believers often commit what's called a conjunction fallacy", meaning they wrongly judge a specific set of conditions as more probable than a single general one. "The probability of a conspiracy actually being true is, of course, very low, but the way that it's framed makes things seem more plausible than they actually are."
The BBC article points out that fakery like this has been going on at least since the Italian Renaissance:
Back in Renaissance Italy, town squares were packed with charlatans who sold all kinds of concoctions by exaggerating their therapeutic claims. In a time long before the development of sanctioned, effective medicines for most illnesses, street peddlers could offer a way out of the complexity, says David Gentilcore, a historian in University of Venice Ca’Foscari who has extensively studied charlatans’ role in the history of medicine.[1]
"A charlatan can come along and say, 'Oh, you have a fever, I have a simple remedy: You take a spoon, a spoonful of this every morning with a glass of wine and it'll put you right. It'll work on anybody, any time of the year, any age,'" explains Gentilcore.
There you have it, a slice of the human condition revealed.
Footnote:
1. Speaking of the charlatans’ role in the history of medicine, the author of a book I reviewed here but can't recall (Johnathan Haidt?), made an interesting observation about quack medical science, arrogant doctors and sloppy thinking. It went like this: The great ancient Greek doctor Galen thought that he had discovered that when he treated a patient and the patient recovered, it was because he was smart and his treatment was effective. When the patient died, it was because he/she was too ill and no doctor or treatment could save them. It took until the 1950s that some doctors in the US to start to accept the possibility that (1) Galen might have been wrong, and maybe, just maybe, (2) placebo controlled clinical trials might be a better way to assess the efficacy of a drug or treatment than just the doctor’s belief that he was always right and dead patients were none of his doing.
In that author’s opinion, Galen’s mistaken belief was responsible for more human deaths and misery than any human ever. What an interesting thought. Probably exaggerated, but still interesting.
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