The bleach-based “miracle cure” mentioned by Donald “Sarcastic” Trump during a Coronavirus briefing on Thursday has been knocking about since 2006, despite numerous warnings about its potentially harmful effects. It was foisted on Ugandans last year, thanks to a US-based pseudo-church.
The Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) is made from the industrial bleach chlorine dioxide mixed with citric acid. It can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
It can also kill you by inducing low blood pressure due to dehydration. A Mexican woman travelling in a yacht with her American husband off Vanuatu died after taking MMS in 2009, Wikipedia tell us.
Despite warnings by health authorities in the US, the UK, Australia, Belgium and France, a New Jersey pastor called Robert Baldwin, working with British “clairvoyant” Sam Little, imported bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China, the Guardian reported last year.
Through a network of 1,200 pastors, the most enthusiastic of whom were given smartphones, some 50,000 Ugandans, including children as young as 14 months old, were given the fake medicine, diluted in water.
Baldwin’s Global Healing ministry claimed it was a cure for cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and pretty much anything else you care to think of.
After the Guardian exposed the scam, he shut down his operations, telling NJ Advance Media “People are calling me Satan.” This seems to have come as a surprise.
Baldwin chose Uganda because it was a poor country with weak regulation, as he told Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against quack medicine who spoke to him posing as a freelance journalist.
“Those people in poor countries they don’t have the options that we have in the richer countries,” he said. “They are much more open to receiving the blessings that God has given them.”
Two French scientists were recently slammed for suggesting that Coronavirus drug trials should be run in Africa, where multinationals have tested other drugs in the past.
WHO boss Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the idea “racist” and a hangover of “colonial mentality” and there was an outcry on social media.
Less-than-successful trials in the developing world haven’t deterred mumbo-jumbo peddlers from pushing their product in the imperial heartland, now that a lot of worried people opens up the gullible market.
The bleach cure idea appears to have been planted in Trump’s disorderly brain by another US MMS advocate, the self-styled “Bishop” Mark Grenon, the Guardian reports.
Grenon, who runs Genesis II – a Florida-based establishment that claims to be a church and which is the largest MMS producer and distributor in the US – wrote to Trump earlier in the week, claiming the bleach mix could cure Covid-19.
Even before Trump’s statement, he was bragging about this initiative in a video on the Genesis II website.
“Trump has got the MMS and all the info!!! Things are happening folks! Lord help others to see the Truth!” he exalted on his Facebook page, which also carries posts relating to various conspiracy theories, on Friday.
Now that the US’s Food and Drug Administration has repeated its warnings about MMS, posts on the Genesis II website have become more defensive, accusing the FDA of “attacks on our Sacraments” and pleading “THIS INSANITY HAS TO STOP!!” (their capitals, obviously).
The term MMS seems to have been dreamt up by the founder and archbishop of Genesis II, former Scientologist Jim Humble, in a self-published book, The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century.
Tracked down in Mexico by ABC News in 2016, he told reporters, “MMS cures nothing”.
A website jimhumble.co continues to describe his “discovery” of chlorine dioxide’s supposed properties as “a breakthrough that can save your life”, however.
Grenon continues to carry the flame. And sell the product.
France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,245, up 389 in 24 hours. 28,658 people are in hospital, down 561 in a day, 4,870 In intensive care, down 183. 43,493 people have been discharged from hospital.
