The Healing Water

Documents show the FDA created a myth to suppress chlorine dioxide, a safe substance with extraordinary curative properties.

When Mark Grenon, 66, and three sons went to prison in 2023, a New York Times headline read: “Family Sentenced for Selling Bleach as Miracle Covid-19 Cure.”

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A doctor with disabling Lyme disease gets her life and health back. A man with multiple sclerosis can lift himself to standing—on feet no longer purple—for the first time in three years. Tumors on a golden retriever and German shepherd shrivel and die in weeks. Children slowly regain years of lost development.

A doctor, nurse practitioner, veterinarian, and homeopath told me these stories, which I will write in detail in my next article. “I felt healed,” said the doctor. “Remarkable,” said the nurse. Their patients were made better and sometimes well, they told me, with the help of a lowly molecule destined for—but so far denied of—medical credibility and serious study: Chlorine dioxide.

Think inexpensive, safer than salt, and government-approved, starting in 1967, to kill pathogens in drinking water; cleanse poultry, fruits, and vegetables; disinfect pulp mills, oil fields, electronics, laboratory “clean rooms,” and medical equipment.

In a 1988 article, NASA said chlorine dioxide was so powerful a germ-killer that it gave it the title the “universal antidote.” The substance, it said, “killed bacteria, viruses, and fungi on or shortly after contact, yet was nontoxic to humans, animals and plants.”

NASA foresaw a day when this compound could heal wounds; save billions by avoiding infections in dairy cows; cleanse dialysis machines; eliminate herpes infection; and, possibly, “alter the course of lung disease.” All but the latter two—which cross the line into human treatment—have come to pass.

In the early 2000s, chloride dioxide teetered on the brink of becoming a new-generation penicillin—but broader. For reasons that remain unclear, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration refashioned the molecule’s stellar image, issuing warnings in 2010 and 2019 that said “many” people had been seriously hurt by using chlorine dioxide. Drinking it was dangerous, said the FDA, which gave chlorine dioxide a nickname that for years has outlived truth: Bleach.

As I report below, new documents show that FDA had virtually no foundation for its dire claims of harm, which could be counted on one hand.

A Film Called The Water

For decades before the FDA warnings, chlorine dioxide was a treatment that worked too well. Its rich history, in at least three countries across two continents, is the stuff of an Oscar-worthy movie. Based on true events and chronicled in many books, a screenplay for a film we will call The Water might look like this:

Act 1, Africa, 1985: Dawn rises over far flung tropical villages in the verdant, but poor, heartland of Nigeria. The orchestra rises and the heartache of languid children, near-death mothers, and pallid farmers comes into focus.

An American scientist with a pedigree in the military and industry arrives to lead a project with a single task: Make steel. First, however, he must tame a cholera epidemic. Using new equipment, he treats the water with just a bit more chlorine dioxide than normally used to purify.

A village doctor rushes up to the engineer. Cholera is gone…but so is malaria. As the drums pound out the news, dug-out canoes by the hundreds arrive, laden with containers to take the water back to neighboring villages. People line up under village mango trees like pilgrims at Lourdes. They take the water.

Act 2, South America, 1996: An Alabama boy and ex-Marine packs his Panama hat and leads an expedition into the mosquito-infested wilds of Guyana. He is a two-day trek from help when two of his crew become feverish and extremely ill.

This explorer is in search of gold but discovers something else entirely. When he gives the men drops of purified water for presumed malaria, they quickly recover. Was it The Water?

Act 3, Africa, 2012: The Ugandan Red Cross Society agrees to undertake a study, in a village in the east called Iganga, to learn if The Water really works. A documentarian is hired to record the first large trial of chlorine dioxide.

Malaria parasites, alive and menacing in one blood smear, disappear in the next. All in the space of one to two days—in 154 people.

Act 4, Flashbacks: The Americans, who believed chlorine dioxide to be Nobel-worthy, share their discovery and are summarily escorted to the border. The Red Cross disavows the study. Officials say they were duped.

Chlorine dioxide goes underground amid scenes of arrests, trials, warnings, and threats. Again and again, headlines blare: Bleach.

As these scenes unfold, the voice of an elderly man is heard, as he speaks to a reporter in 2026—me—decades after his thwarted work in the Nigerian heartland.

“We didn’t have a solution to the big problem. How are you going to feed the kids? I’ve agonized over this, lost sleep over this.” He struggles for composure, takes a deep breath. “It goes beyond what you can imagine.”

Credits rise: “Nearly every minute a child under five dies of malaria,” they begin. “Based on true events.”

Reports of harm? Nil

As metaphorical drums spread the word about CD across countries and decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration created a false narrative and set media watchdogs loose. Consumers were warned, in a 2010 press release: “‘Miracle’ Treatment Turns into Potent Bleach.” Again, in 2019, FDA told consumers not to drink what it called “a strong chemical that is used as bleach.”

Yet CD has just one thing in common with household cleaners like Clorox: a chlorine atom. Both are used to purify water. Sodium hypochlorite (bleach), however, can combine with organic matter to form carcinogenic trihalomethanes. CD breaks down into harmless oxygen and salt, mostly in the stomach and small intestine.

Nonetheless, both CD warnings were long on hyperbole. FDA claimed in 2019 that it had received “many reports”—no number was given—of “severe vomiting, severe diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration, and acute liver failure after drinking these products.”

The agency had virtually nothing to support these alarming claims, new documents reveal.

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From 2011 to 2020, five reports of ‘adverse events’ from chlorine dioxide were reported to the FDA. Compare that to 75,423 for aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid).

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Ricardo Beas, pastor of the Natural Law Church of Health and Healing, fought for more than five years to obtain “all studies and documents” used by the FDA leading up to and since the 2010 warning “regarding claims of the dangers of the use and consumption of chlorine dioxide.”

Records were finally released on January 2, 2026, under the Freedom of Information Act. They included:

• No studies and no explanation, although Beas had specifically requested: “If any or all documents do not exist please note that specifically.”

• Three “adverse event” reports, none of them fatal, and all of them dated after the first warning was posted in 2010.

To put those three reports into perspective, the FDA’s adverse event system receives more than two million submissions a year for “drugs and therapeutic biologic products.” The FDA received 75,000 reports on aspirin alone from 2011 to 2020. Five reports were filed on chlorine dioxide, according to a 2020 study in the International Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences.

Pastor Beas, in a post on the church’s website, wrote that the documents prove: “The FDA had no studies, analysis, or injury reports that would justify or back up the warning they issued…To this date, FDA has no studies or similar research documents that confirm without a doubt that chlorine dioxide/MMS is unsafe to use as a cure or treatment for disease.”

The Dose Matters

Chlorine dioxide can be toxic, as are many commonly ingested products and drugs. Patients are routinely given coumadin—a common rat poison—to prevent blood clots. Too much sodium chloride—better known as table salt—can also kill. As a famous medical saying goes, “The dose makes the poison.” A handful of CD toxicity reports in the medical literature—including reversible renal failure and two suicide attempts—generally involved high doses.

As for the bleach claim, CD does have a role as a whitener in paper production. But wood pulp bleach contains a vastly higher concentration of chlorine dioxide—6,000 ppm—compared to 30 ppm in a successful clinical trial of patients infected with Covid-19.

An anonymous critical care nurse, called Curious Outlier, has studied chlorine dioxide for nearly a decade, producing a documentary, “The Universal Antidote,” that he regularly updates.

“The anti-chlorine dioxide crowd has one argument and one argument only against chlorine dioxide,” Curious states in his documentary. “This argument”—that it’s bleach—“is simply propaganda.”

To put CD’s antiviral power into perspective, researchers applied one to one hundred parts per million of chlorine dioxide to human influenza, measles, herpes, adenovirus, canine distemper, and parvovirus. The bugs in petri dishes were killed within fifteen seconds using those trace levels.

Studies show no toxicity from chlorine dioxide exposure in rats exposed in air for six months; 198 people exposed through drinking water; and in 60 volunteers who ingested up to 24 parts per million over sixteen days.

A lab study of CD’s use as an antiseptic found “a few minutes…is quite enough to kill all bacteria, but short enough to keep ClO2 penetration…safely below…cytotoxic effects.” Researchers called it an “ideal biocide…that “does not cause any harm to humans or to animals.” Studies in animals further suggest CD does not affect the microbiome except at levels beyond what is used to clean water or as a therapy.

Sometime in early 2025, FDA took down its 2019 warning against CD, which some see as sign of potential policy change. When I asked the agency about the warning’s removal, I was told, “Typically, the FDA archives Safety Communications that are more than two years old if there is no new information.”

Nonetheless, other live FDA pages perpetuate the CD-is-Clorox myth. A glaring example is a post on the prosecution of Mark Grenon, a medical missionary who spread the CD gospel to twenty countries after treating his eight sons and himself for MRSA in the Dominican Republic A press release states, “FDA has received reports of people requiring hospitalizations, developing life-threatening conditions, and dying”—although few injuries and no deaths were reported in the FOIA documents. Government officials did not respond to my question about the lack of documented harm.

Faithful to the FDA’s propaganda narrative, a July 2025 Wired article on chlorine dioxide bore the headline: “The Bleach Community Is Ready for RFK Jr. to Make Their Dreams Come True.”

Heal Thyself, Literally

Vilified by government and media, chlorine dioxide exists largely in the shadows. A global underground network of CD users thrives, in many languages and countries. Members trade protocols, studies, documentaries, books, and, most of all, instructive stories of chlorine dioxide, their trial-and-error missteps, and their sometimes impressive successes.

They treat themselves with chlorine dioxide because few doctors dare to or will: For shingles, eczema, flu, covid, dementia, high blood pressure, parasites, hepatitis, arthritis in cats, pneumonia in dogs (yes, there is a pet protocol), thyroid cancer, depression, pulmonary disease, lichen sclerosis, and much, much more.

In this Wild West of medicine, Curious Outlier provides support, hosting Telegram chat groups and offering step-by-step instruction and a free course on CD.

“Giving us tools to use at our discretion,” a follower commented on a Curious article on HIV, “is a selfless act.”

Most recently, this cadre of outliers (Curious has 87,000 members on one Telegram channel alone) has been emboldened by a once-mainstream pulmonologist-turned-medical-system-critic who has joined their fold.

Dr. Pierre Kory, who led a movement for safe, inexpensive Covid-19 treatments (and with whom I have written op-ed articles), has written a book, with Jenna McCarthy, that suggests history is repeating itself. They self-published The War on Chlorine Dioxide: The Medicine That Could End Medicine because such subject matter faces likely banishment from Amazon and elsewhere.

The Disinformation Playbook protected tobacco profits in the 1960s; it sidelined ivermectin in the early 2020s. Now, they contend, it has its sights on chlorine dioxide.

“Doubt is our product,” a tobacco industry executive wrote in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”

Promising but Insufficient Evidence

In the late 1970s, researchers at Downstate Medical Center tested Alcide—the CD formulation that impressed NASA—on herpes infection. “Prompt remission” occurred in twenty-one of twenty-two oral herpes patients, and in five of six with genital herpes. Significantly, few relapses occurred for oral cases; there were no genital herpes recurrences, a finding which could save a lot of misery and cost for a disease that infects a half million Americans annually.

The legacy of Howard Alliger, who pioneered chlorine dioxide research in the 1970s to the late 2010s, lives on in products for oral, nasal, and wound care. But the Alcide herpes treatment today sits on the proverbial shelf with his forty patents, including a treatment for cancer. Before the FDA turned on CD, Alliger had worked with the Centers for Disease Control, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and even the FDA, toward the development of hundreds of CD uses.

In a world of million-dollar trials for billion-dollar profits, there’s little interest in a substance that costs about $35 online and, at doses measured in drops, can last for months. Here is a sliver of what we know about a substance in fierce need of study and validation:

• Children in Japan who inhaled small amounts in a classroom ventilation system had less than half the rate of absenteeism of a control group.

• Ten rats that inhaled “extremely low concentrations” of CD along with the influenza A virus all survived; seven of ten that were exposed only to the flu virus died.

• CD healed wounds in diabetic rats and in dogs and guinea pigs, for which Alcide “greatly reduced inflammatory infiltrates” and minimized scarring.

• In three case studies, chlorine dioxide relieved diabetic foot ulcers, which could possibly reduce amputations in severe cases.

• Dermatologists saw remarkable improvement in 2018 in four people with a common, goose-bump like skin condition called keratosis pilaris. “Given its unique properties,” authors wrote, “one must wonder why it is (sic) has not already been used in dermatology.”

• In a separate single case, chlorine dioxide helped resolve life-threatening necrotizing fasciitis in a complexly ill patient.

• Perhaps most instructive is how chlorine dioxide’s effectiveness was suppressed and maligned during the pandemic, when the FDA “bleach” warning was broadcast in the media. Reports were marginalized or ignored that showed CD prevented covid and its long-term symptoms. As for treatment, an October 2020 report by a coalition of 3,000 Latin American doctors urged its use, having found that CD doses “many times below the toxic range” quelled the infection.

The proposal was largely ignored in the United States and Europe. In Central and South America, clinics were shut down, a Peruvian doctor was fired, and the treatment suppressed.

Nonetheless, heroes like Dr. Patricia Callisperis in Bolivia and Dr. Manuel Aparicio in Mexico defied authorities and reported success rates against covid of near 100 percent. (Their stories and others are told in emotional videos; Dr. Kory asked a renowned polygraph expert, Louis Conte, to analyze one. Conte concluded the physician did not exhibit evasive and other behavior typical of deception, describing what he said was “an honest doctor.”)

The vilification of chlorine dioxide leaves a vacuum of care, with patients on their own to figure out measurements, protocols and timing. As one new user put: “Is there a list of protocols somewhere?…don’t know how anyone decides which protocol is best.”

Curious Outlier, who is regularly on his telegram channels to help, counsels fortitude. “Consider this thought,” he told me. “If something can eliminate 80 to 90 percent of your need for a doctor for the rest of your life, wouldn’t it be worth understanding thoroughly?”

Beyond the do-it-yourself approach, a range of chlorine dioxide products that Alliger developed are publicly available and more easily managed. I heard several reports that the company’s nasal spray, Snoot, had results beyond the packaged purpose. A doctor I know who does not use chlorine dioxide told me of a patient with a drug-resistant urinary tract infection, called pseudomonas aeruginosa. She had been treated with powerful antibiotics by two out-of-state specialists, but it nonetheless persisted. Then she incidentally tried Snoot, the doctor told me, and the infection resolved.

Indeed, chlorine dioxide might just quell a scourge of antimicrobial resistance that kills 1.3 million people annually.

“Currently, the ‘salvage’ antibiotics being used, even in combination, largely fail patients and lead to their deaths,” Dr. Kory told me. And yes, “a simple compound given either orally or intravenously could save all these unfortunate hospitalized patients.”

Here is the rub, and reason to resist, for mainstream medicine: “Chlorine dioxide could conceivably decimate the need for infectious disease specialists,” Kory said, “given its broad, potent efficacy and tolerability.”