Jim Humble demonstrates the mixing of MMS, which ‘water purifying’ substances, superimposed here, form a version of. Image: Archi Banal
Jim Humble demonstrates the mixing of MMS, which ‘water purifying’ substances, superimposed here, form a version of. Image: Archi Banal

ScienceApril 13, 2022

NZ retailer keeps hawking ‘miracle’ bleach after Covid-infected user admitted to ICU

Jim Humble demonstrates the mixing of MMS, which ‘water purifying’ substances, superimposed here, form a version of. Image: Archi Banal
Jim Humble demonstrates the mixing of MMS, which ‘water purifying’ substances, superimposed here, form a version of. Image: Archi Banal

A group of US men behind the phony ‘church’ that profited from peddling the dangerous substance face criminal charges. A New Zealander with Covid was admitted to intensive care after taking the stuff. But a Waikato man just keeps promoting and selling it.

Despite the revelation that a Covid-positive patient was admitted to a New Zealand hospital intensive care unit after consuming a dangerous industrial bleach that is often branded as “Miracle Mineral Solution”, the product is still being promoted and sold by a New Zealand-based website. A site promoting MMS, and a linked site that retails it as a “water purification solution”, continue to operate even as Medsafe pursues a prosecution through the courts, the New Zealand medicines regulator has confirmed.

Miracle Mineral Solution – or MMS – contains high levels of sodium chlorite, typically found in textile bleaches or disinfectants. It gained notoriety when promoted and sold by self-styled archbishops of a sham church based in Florida who falsely claimed it could cure everything from cancer to HIV, autism to Parkinson’s – and, most recently, Covid-19. Members of the US family behind the product are currently facing criminal charges in the US.

In New Zealand, Medsafe has repeatedly warned consumers about the potentially life-threatening risks involved in consuming Miracle Mineral Solution products, with alerts previously issued in 2010, 2015  and 2020. Its most recent statement advises a recent “report of someone requiring ICU treatment after taking Miracle Mineral Solution with the intention of treating Covid-19 disease”. Its advice is unequivocal: “Do not consume Miracle Mineral Solution products, including for the prevention or treatment of Covid-19 disease. These products can cause dangerous and potentially life-threatening side effects.”

Chris James, group manager of Medsafe NZ, told The Spinoff that the case involved a Covid-positive New Zealander who had “attempted to treat themselves with a water purification solution”. He said: “There is absolutely no evidence that these products are an effective treatment for Covid-19 or any other pathogens within the body. In fact, ingesting these products can cause dangerous and potentially life-threatening side effects, such as acute liver failure.” 

The Medsafe advice is clear: “Do not buy or consume (drink) Miracle Mineral Solution products or associated products described as water purification solutions. Consuming these products is the same as drinking bleach. When consumed, these products can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and symptoms of severe dehydration. These may be life-threatening, and you should seek medical advice as soon as possible.”

‘Miracle Mineral NZ’

A website with a .nz domain called “Miracle Mineral” that promotes the product states, “this website cannot and will not make any public claims that MMS ‘treats’ or ‘cures’ serious diseases or conditions”, before unleashing a series of false assertions about the product’s efficacy, while skating over the grave dangers of consuming it.

The site includes a denunciation of New Zealand’s “fake news mainstream media” and attacks science communicators. It features dozens of unevidenced “testimonies” ascribed to people who claim to have been “cured”, as well as lengthy instructions on how to mix and consume the product. 

In 2020, forensic scientist Dr Ian Calhaem demonstrated for RNZ how sodium chlorite and hydrochloric acid, when prepared in accordance with the instructions on the New Zealand Miracle Mineral site, produced a substance “acidic enough to rust a steel bar within two hours of being immersed”.

While located on a .nz high-level domain, the site is registered to Mark Grenon, the American leader of the “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing”. Grenon, who leads the self-described “non-religious” organisation, is currently in Bogotá, Colombia, from where US federal authorities are seeking to extradite him to face charges in relation to the marketing and selling of MMS.

Grenon has a New Zealand associate, however. Roger Blake, who has described himself as a Genesis II Church “bishop”, told Newsroom in 2017 that he was involved in the MMS site. He said: “It’s sort of like a network where we all work together, the people over there might get an inquiry, they’ll forward an email onto me and ask if I can help and that sort of thing, we all work together and it’s a really good structure.”

The NZ ‘Miracle Mineral’ site; the NZ Water Purifier site; and the emailed response from NZ Water Purifier

Potential purchasers who visit the New Zealand MMS site today are sent to a “water precaution suppliers” site. That in turn directs anyone resident in New Zealand – as well as those in Sweden, Canada and the Philippines – to a water purifier products website in New Zealand. That site is registered to Blake, who runs the operation from his Ngatea Water Gardens business in Waikato. 

Blake did not respond to invitations from The Spinoff to respond to questions. In 2020 he told RNZ that warnings of the dangers of the substance were “fake propaganda”, and that he consumed the product himself. Five years ago he said, “I haven’t had anyone say ‘this nearly killed me’ or anything. If it did I would drop it like a hot potato.”

The report of a patient being admitted to ICU after using the product does not appear to have shaken his belief. While website purchases are temporarily suspended “due to a fire on the premises”, they are welcomed via email. An inquiry sent yesterday prompted an enthusiastic reply and list of items for sale within three minutes.

The testimonies page on the Miracle Mineral site includes gushing reviews from people who have purchased the product at the Waikato premise as well as online. One describes attending a “two-day course in Ngatea” that was “so revealing and refreshing” that they felt “now armed with such that we have a solution to almost all health issues on the planet … Thank you, everyone, MMS family.”

Two years ago, Blake issued an appeal for donations after a July 2020 “incident”, which, he said, saw “10 officers arrive unannounced to our private residence and business locale”.  He said: “As all of my water purifier products have now been seized and removed, I am no longer able to supply your water treatment product needs until further notice. Further investigations are being conducted, and I have not been given a specified time of how long this investigation may take.”

Medsafe confirmed it was monitoring the company and pursuing legal action. 

Chris James told The Spinoff the organisation is “extremely concerned with the misleading claims made about the product and has had enforcement actions under way for some time against Roger Blake and his company NZ Water Purifier Ltd. This has included issuing a breach notice and laying a number of charges with the District Court under the Medicines Act 1981. As this is an active prosecution, we are unable to provide any further information at this time.”

Donald Trump’s flirtation with ‘disinfectant’ use against Covid-19 led to a surge in the product launched by James Humble.

‘The Genesis II Church’

In 1996, former Scientologist Jim Humble, who at one point declared himself to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy dispatched to Earth to save humanity, stumbled upon what would become “Miracle Mineral Solution”. By his own, deeply unreliable account he cured four fellow gold miners of malaria by mixing sodium chlorite into their drinking water. In 2010, Humble welcomed born-again Christian Mark Grenon to join him in leading the “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing” – a bogus church that professed to pursue “spirituality” rather than religion. Both men declared themselves “archbishops” and set about spreading the fabulist gospel of sodium chlorite as a “miracle mineral” panacea. They travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand, to preach and profit

In the middle of the last decade, the two men parted ways acrimoniously, and Humble would later disavow MMS, saying it “cures nothing”. Grenon continued the scam, however, joining with several of his children to make a fortune out of selling MMS in the US and worldwide, premised on the baseless claim that chlorine dioxide could defeat 95% of known diseases. No surprise, therefore, that they saw an opportunity with Covid-19. Interest reportedly surged when then president Donald Trump urged his officials to look into such products for Covid treatment. 

As they attempted to leverage off pandemic fears, however, Mark Grenon and three of his sons were arrested and indicted by a grand jury for their roles in promoting and selling MMS as part of a US federal investigation called Operation Quack Hack. While two of his sons await trial, Mark and another of his sons are today in prison in Colombia, fighting extradition.

There is no evidence to connect the patient who wound up in intensive care with the Ngatea-based operation. Of the individual who consumed the product in New Zealand, Chris James said this: “Thankfully, we can confirm the person who needed ICU treatment is now on the road to recovery. Out of respect for patient privacy, we won’t be making any further comment.”

Keep going!
Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal
Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal

ScienceApril 8, 2022

Vaccine resistance linked to ‘deep-seated’ childhood experiences, Dunedin Study finds

Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal
Photo: Getty Images, additional design by Archi Banal

Data drawing on participants in the five-decade research project suggest Covid vaccine resistance emerges from a mistrust seeded in the earliest years of life, backing calls for a more devolved response that entrusts communities.

Vaccine resistance and hesitancy often stems from a mistrust engendered in upbringings blighted by abuse, neglect and deprivation. That’s the finding from new research undertaken as part of the Dunedin Study.

The results come out of a special survey of participants in the pioneering University of Otago longitudinal study. The group was asked about their vaccination intentions in June 2021, shortly before the general rollout began, and individuals’ responses were compared to information collected from them in the 70s and 80s in relation to their childhood and personality.

The findings – adjusted for socioeconomic factors – suggested that among the 13% who were resistant to vaccination there was a markedly higher experience of “adverse childhood experiences that foster mistrust, longstanding mental-health problems that foster misinterpretation of messaging, and early-emerging personality traits including tendencies toward extreme negative emotions, shutting down mentally under stress, nonconformism, and fatalism about health.”

“What they appear to learn during childhood is if anyone comes to you with authority, they’re just trying to get something, and they don’t care about you, they’ll take advantage,” said Professor Terrie Moffitt, associate director of the Dunedin Study and lead author of the paper published in PNAS Nexus. 

“That kind of learning at that age leaves you with a sort of a legacy of mistrust,” said Moffitt, who is based at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s so deep-seated that it automatically brings up extreme emotions.”  

From ‘Deep-Seated Psychological Histories of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitance and Resistance’, PNAS Nexus

Professor Richie Poulton, a co-author of the research and director of the Dunedin Study, told The Spinoff there was a range of experiences classified as adverse. “At the extreme end they may have been sexually abused, been exposed to extreme violence, belted around. Others have been neglected, grown up in chaotic environments, left on their own, isolated in school.”

It meant such children “started from way behind, with all the crappy stuff to deal with. That can set you up, when you’ve had that early life experience about how life works. You can be highly alert to potential threat and danger, distrustful of parental figures, for example, if they’re part of the problem, and other figures of authority.”

For many people brought up in such circumstances, it became “a vicious cycle”, he said. “You get tuned in real quick to think: OK, I’m on my own here. And when the proverbial hits the fan I’ve got to look after myself, I’m not going to trust any of these people. And that evolves and deepens … You find by the time they’re young adults they have a personality in which they’re highly stress reactive, and may see danger where it doesn’t exist.” That became an “ingrained” mistrust of authority and institutions that came to the surface in the face of a high-stress situation like a pandemic. 

Richie Poulton, director of the Dunedin Study, in the TVNZ series Why Am I?

A critical lesson of all that, said Poulton, was that people were much likelier to listen to people in their own communities than messages from on high. “You can have a different conversation, that might go somewhere, if it’s with someone from my community, my town – I know you’re not out to get me so I might give it a go.” The research showed it was counterproductive to “belittle” those who were reluctant to be vaccinated, he said. Such an approach was only likely to “harden their resolve” – a direct and local engagement was “much more useful than shouting vitriol across the barriers”.

He hoped the study might help provide “an objective, but humane perspective to something that has become highly politicised – not just here but around the world, for different reasons. We want to say, with some compassion, this is what the data tell us, so look at what it says, don’t going firing off with ‘I know best’ … It’s about cooling down those interactions, looking for ways to create trust, in which you then share your message.” 

Aotearoa today has a very highly Covid-vaccinated population by global standards, with around 95% of eligible New Zealanders having had at least two doses. The lesson for the next time such a crisis is confronted is the need to “move more quickly to devolve to communities the responsibility for delivering vaccinations”, said Poulton. “That creates a comparatively higher trust environment. For human, understandable reasons, being told [via] 1pm message from Wellington just doesn’t cut it, because their levels of mistrust are so great.”

For a long time, Māori and Pasifika community leaders had called for resources and support, “then they got sick of waiting and just did it, and you saw the massive response to that approach”, said Poulton. “It’s about the power of devolution and trusting the wisdom and effectiveness of community delivery.”

The findings are published just days after the Dunedin Study, which follows a cohort of more than 1,000 people born in Dunedin in 1972 and 1973, celebrated its 50th birthday

The latest research, said Poulton, “highlights how with an amazing reservoir of goodwill and data, collected across half a century, we can quickly and agilely turn our attention to a current event and access this vast and rich information about our study members’ history to shed light on what might be driving current behaviour, and point out where you might want to change your strategy, in the short and long term.”