Donald Trump’s private golf resort in South Florida will next week host one of the world’s leading purveyors of chlorine dioxide, a potentially life-threatening form of industrial bleach that is claimed without evidence to be a cure for cancer, Covid and autism.
Andreas Kalcker is among50 listed speakersat the “Truth Seekers Conference”, a two-day event opening on Thursday at the US president’s resort, Trump National Doral Miami. The event features several anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists who have been brought together by the far-right commentator Charlie Ward.
Kalcker, a German national thought to be living in Switzerland, markets the bleach under the brand name “CDS”, for chlorine dioxide solution. Hisonline brochuresclaim that the toxic chemical, which he admits is adisinfectant, can “eliminate pathogens” that cause disease.
He boasts it is “possibly the greatest medical discovery of the last 100 years”.
Government health authorities in the US and Spain have denounced the remedy as fraudulent, saying it is no different from drinking bleach. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that it can cause serious and even life-threatening side-effects, including dehydration, diarrhoea andkidney injury.
Kalcker’s appearance at Thursday’s conference is the latest indication that potentially dangerous alternative health approaches are being emboldened and are proliferating during Trump’s second term in the White House. The US president’s choice of the prominent vaccine skeptic, Robert Kennedy Jr, to head the Department of Health and Human Services has spread alarm through medical circles.
Kennedy, who until 2023 led the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, has talked about treating the current measles outbreak in Texas withcod liver oil. He also praised without any evidence two doctors in Texas whomhe claimedhad “healed” 300 children with measles using the inhaled steroid budesonide.
At hisconfirmation hearingsfor the health secretary job, Kennedy directly mentioned chlorine dioxide. He praised Trump’s handling of pandemic, saying the president had not only speeded up the search for a Covid vaccine but had looked at “all of the different remedies including … even chlorine dioxide”.
Kennedy’s remark helped solve one of the enduring mysteries of Trump’s first term. In April 2020, early in the pandemic, he astonished medical scientists around the world by advocating the use of “disinfectant” as a treatment for Covid.
At a White House press conference,Trump said: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
Kennedy’s confirmation comments clarified that Trump was indeed referring to chlorine dioxide, a toxin that been falsely claimed as a “miracle cure” for autism, cancer, malaria and HIV/Aids.
Since Trump re-entered the White House in January his new administration has overseen an unprecedented censorship of government information relating to science. Several federal public health websites and databases havegone dark.
The FDAwebsite pagethat describes chlorine dioxide as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment”, and warning that it can be life threatening, has been taken down and replaced with a “page not found” notice.
However, apress releasefrom 2019 publicizing an FDA announcement on the dangers of chlorine dioxide can still be found on the FDA website.
It states: “The US Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to purchase or drink a product sold online as a medical treatment due to a recent rise in reported health issues. Chlorine dioxide products, when mixed, develop into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.”
The main distributor of “miracle cure” bleach in the US, Mark Grenon, was sentenced tofive years in prisonfor selling an “unapproved and misbranded drug” in October 2023. His sons Jonathan and Jordan Grenon were sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison.
Kalcker is one of the most prominent peddlers of the bleach remedy. He has had success selling chlorine dioxide through many Latin American countries, including Bolivia and Mexico.
He wraps his product in pseudo-scientific language, calling himself Dr Kalcker and claiming he is a specialist in “electromolecular medicine”. He has set up what he calls atraining institute, and claims without evidence that his products can lead to “recovery” from autism, dramatic improvement in Parkinson’s disease, and healing from “vaccine damage”.
“Kalcker presents himself as a doctor, is very clever, and has created a product that sounds and looks plausible. But at the same time he is promoting the lunatic idea that autism is caused by parasites,” said Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against pseudoscience who has autistic children.
In 2021, Kalcker wasinvestigatedby Argentinian authorities and charged with falsely promoting bleach as a medical cure following the death of a five-year-old boy who had been given chlorine dioxide by his parents.
In addition to promoting his remedy on stage at Trump’s Doral resort, Kalcker will be selling books about his bleach product at a vendor stall.
The Guardian asked Trump’s resort whether it was appropriate to allow its space to be used to promote a potentially dangerous bleach remedy, but received no immediate reply.
The organiser of the Doral conference, Charlie Ward, is an associate of the president’s son, Eric Trump. He has promoted a number of conspiracy theories including QAnon.
In aspeech in 2022recorded by the monitoring group Media Matters he downplayed the Holocaust, saying that fewer people had died as a result of it than through vaccines. “More people have been killed by the jab than were killed in the Holocaust,” he said.