In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery. One particularly dangerous "cure" involves bleach. Lately, the quacks hawking a bleach solution have rebranded it as a cure for coronavirus.
From the US Department of Justice:
A federal grand jury in Miami has returned an indictment charging a Florida man -- Mark Grenon, 62 -- and his three sons -- Jonathan Grenon, 34, Jordan Grenon, 26, and Joseph Grenon, 32 -- with fraudulently marketing and selling “Miracle Mineral Solution,” a toxic industrial bleach, as a cure for COVID-19, cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, autism, malaria, hepatitis, Parkinson’s, herpes, HIV/AIDS, and other serious medical conditions, and with defying federal court orders.
Jonathan and Jordan Grenon were arrested last summer on related charges based on a criminal complaint filed by Miami federal prosecutors.
One year ago today, Ed Pilkington reported at The Guardian:
The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.
In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.
A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president said that disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!”
Trump did not specify where the idea of using disinfectant as a possible remedy for Covid-19 came from, and the source for his notion remains obscure. But the Guardian has learned that peddlers of chlorine dioxide – industrial bleach – have been making direct approaches to the White House in recent days.
