Since the beginning of the pandemic, digital publicity and political lobbying in favor of chlorine dioxide as a cure for Covid-19 and other illnesses has intensified. Behind it are a German alchemist, two Swiss nationals, their volatile companies, and a plethora of followers who claim to be in favor of health and life, with no regard for the victims they leave behind. Along with the miraculous chemical, they also sell the devices that produce it, as well as books, diplomas, videos, congresses and even concerts.
Epigraph
“They unscrupulously sold supposed medicines to which they gave the character of universal panaceas, capable of quickly curing all kinds of ailments. And they circulated them at all social levels”.
Essay on the charlatans of the XV to XVII centuries.
Miguel López Pérez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2016.
“I took chlorine dioxide,” said vice president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, David Choquehuanca, cornered by the cameras. He made the confession at the beginning of 2022, almost a year after the arrival of the first batch of vaccines to the country and after having been criticized by several sectors for not taking the vaccine earlier and setting an example. When he eventually did take the vaccine, a ceremony was organized by three amautas (wise men) who set up an incense burner to purify him before he bared his arm for the needle.
A few days later, on January 9th, Evo Morales, former Bolivian president, urged his compatriots to get vaccinated, but also recommended dioxide. “We must go to the vaccination centers. This campaign is important, we cannot lack ivermectin at home and, with medical recommendation, chlorine dioxide and our medicinal herbs that help us so much,” he said.
There are no reliable scientific studies that recommend chlorine dioxide as a cure or prevention for the infamous virus. This is a substance – with chemical formula ClO2 – used to purify water in large volumes or to bleach paper, and in certain concentrations it can be dangerous for human consumption. There are several documented cases of deaths caused by the substance. In 2009, a Mexican woman died in the Solomon Islands after consuming chlorine dioxide in an attempt to prevent malaria. In 2020, a five-year-old boy and a 50-year-old man died in Argentina after ingesting the potion. And in 2021, a well-known Austrian anti-vaccine activist died after contracting Covid-19 and attempting to treat it exclusively with chlorine dioxide.
With so much evidence against it, why do many politicians on the continent continue to recommend chlorine dioxide?
For more than a decade, chlorine dioxide has been sold (surreptitiously and illegally in some countries) as a supposed panacea to cure all ills, including autism, cancer, and AIDS. Until 2020, its commercialization was promoted in small online niches, many of them linked to a church dedicated to selling the product. However, with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the uncertainty it brought, sellers figured it would be good fishing in troubled waters, and they could make a profit. Today, major Latin American media have conducted interviews and programs on this chemical, and it has even been the subject of parliamentary debates in many countries in the region.
A collaborative, cross-border journalistic investigation found links between the church that originally promoted ClO2 and a multifaceted organization called the Global Coalition for Health and Life (Comusav), a group that has exploited vaccine delays and public fears about the virus for financial gain. Based on questionable clinical studies and multiple tearful testimonials, Comusav has mounted a successful and relatively sophisticated disinformation campaign. This journalistic alliance, formed by Agencia Ocote in Guatemala, Animal Político in Mexico, Aos Fatos in Brazil, Bolivia Verifica, Chequeado in Argentina, Colombiacheck and Cuestión Pública in Colombia, Efecto Cocuyo in Venezuela and Univision’s El Detector in the United States, with the coordination of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), tells about the problems with justice of the “archbishops” of the chlorine dioxide church, and the multiple companies set up in different countries by the architects of Comusav. This journalistic investigation dismantles piece by piece the virtual disinformation campaign that gave them credibility before thousands of unsuspecting people, put everyone’s health at risk inviting them not to get vaccinated, opened the doors of several Latin American congresses, created a law in Bolivia and obtained the donation of a building in Mexico.
Although the major marketers of chlorine dioxide (notably among them Andreas Ludwig Kalcker, a German citizen) say they want to save lives, the evidence found by this team shows that they are more interested in their own financial salvation and swelling of their coffers with the sales of the chemical and its associated promotional material.
The church challenges the judge
Since 2006, American Jim Humble had been promoting chlorine dioxide as a solution for all ills. He had written a book and set up multiple companies -with varying results- to push it. In 2010 he met his compatriot Mark Grenon, who was also not doing too well in his church ventures in the Dominican Republic. That’s when they put their semi-failed businesses together and founded a church that distributed chlorine dioxide as a sacrament, as if it were the equivalent of communion in a Catholic church. They named it Genesis II Church of Health and Healing (sometimes abbreviated as G2C) and set up their founding headquarters in Barahona, Dominican Republic. G2C prospered and sold bishop degrees for $1700. In exchange, the bishops could ordain “health pastors” and use the church’s name to spread the miraculous message of chlorine dioxide and, of course, share in the church’s sales. The church said it went on to open 21 chapters and win over parishioners in 14 countries on three continents, according to the 2020 version of its own website, recovered thanks to the WayBack Machine query tool.
After six years, the two false prophets split up commercially, apparently due to disagreements over how to share profits, which at the time were still relatively small. In his many books and lectures, Humble identifies himself as the creator of the original formula for the chemical concoction he called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), but it was Grenon who got the church in the end. Following the pandemic, he would go on to see his business grow, according to court documents from a subsequent U.S. indictment obtained by this reporting team.
In 2021, Bloomberg published a story about the rise and fall of this church that was generating thousands of dollars for its founders.
The U.S. FDA, which authorizes sales of drugs and foodstuffs to ensure that they are not harmful, had been reiterating since 2010 that the mineral solution was not miraculous but dangerous and was not approved for medical use. It also warned that selling it for that purpose was not allowed. Seeing the growth in sales of MMS with the pandemic, alarms went off. In July 2020, Florida police arrested two of Grenon’s sons who were helping him in the business, after raiding the G2C church headquarters.
The indictment brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida against the Grenons reveals just how much the business had grown in the pandemic. According to information provided by Wells Fargo Bank at trial, Mark Grenon and his three arrested sons went from recording revenues of $32,000 in December 2019 to $123,000 in March 2020, when the world was just beginning to learn about the lethality of the virus.
Jose Rivera, FDA agent, said during trial that it was thanks to the constant public statements by Grenon and Humble themselves about how the creation of a church was a ploy to sell MMS, that he was able to open a legal case against them. First, in May 2020, Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued an order against the Grenons and the Genesis II church banning them from selling or labelling chlorine dioxide-based products as medicine.
This alliance contacted Mark Grenon’s attorney in Colombia, Augusto Sanchez, to obtain Grenon’s version of these events, but did not get an answer. When contacted by telephone, he refused to give us information and when contacted by e-mail we did not get a response.
The church stopped selling MMS on its site but -as the FDA investigation found- it continued to offer it through other channels, such as YouTube videos or other affiliated sites. In addition, Mark Grenon defiantly repeated on his podcast that he was violating the court order. This culminated in the arrests of his sons in Florida and then of Mark himself and his other son Joseph in Santa Marta, a resort town on the Colombian Caribbean where they had been living for nine years. The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office captured them at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, which accused them of fraud to evade regulations. Joseph Grenon was extradited to Florida in September 2021, a month after the British newspaper The Guardian denounced that he and his father were still selling the miraculous solution from a jail in Bogota.
On a January 5th, 2022 decision, U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida ordered the continuation of the trial against the Grenons and set a timetable for the proceedings with a deadline on August 5th for the defendants to enter a guilty plea if they so wish. The jury trial is scheduled to being on September 12th of this year.
After the Grenons’ arrests, the church’s business collapsed. Virtually all associated social media pages and profiles were deleted and its chapters in the various countries appear to be inactive.
While this was taking place, Andreas Kalcker, a “bishop” of the G2C church, was enjoying a bonanza of his own.
Bishop Kalcker stays with Comusav
Andres Ludwig Kalcker, German, presents himself as a biophysicist – although, according to Chequeado and Colombiacheck, part of this alliance, his degree was obtained at the Open University of Advanced Sciences, a naturist university accused of selling degrees on the Internet. Kalcker worked as a sound engineer at the beginning of the century, participating in a recording of the Catalan soprano Montserrat Caballé. In 2008, he changed careers and achieved some notoriety when, under the pseudonym Aluka, he announced an invention: a combustion engine that ran on a hybrid of gasoline and water and supposedly improved the original idea of inventor Paul Pantone.
Five years later, he re-emerged as the author of Health is Possible. In this book he says it all started when his friend Josep Pàmies – another promoter of chlorine dioxide, a native of Lleida, Catalonia – called him. Pàmies had been sanctioned several times by the authorities for violating chlorine dioxide regulations. In 2010, the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products had warned that selling chlorine dioxide in the country as a medicine was illegal. Pàmies asked Kalcker to treat the calves of a well-known farmer. Kalcker tried the MMS and, according to him, the calves were cured. He wrote to Jim Humble of G2C with the good news, and so they contacted each other. Then Kalcker says he continued experimenting with the formula and succeeded in developing an improved MMS, which he called CDS, chlorine dioxide solution. He also launched an injectable version, which he claimed was more effective, and he called CDI (chlorine dioxide injection).
Kalcker had been selling chlorine dioxide long before that. A 2009 record from the website mmsmineral.com, archived by the Wayback Machine, shows that it was already selling the substance. The legal information on the site mentions the company Optibolsa SL, of which Kalcker has been manager since 2005. In 2010, the Spanish Ministry of Health warned that Kalcker’s website was selling the substance.
However, when asked about his companies, Kalcker told this journalistic alliance: “I don’t have companies that sell chlorine dioxide”, although he clarified that selling it as a “disinfectant for drinking water” is “absolutely legal”.
At the end of October 2012, Kalcker was arrested on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza by the Spanish Civil Guard for organizing a conference on chlorine dioxide. A month later, Humble put out a newsletter supporting Kalcker before the legal authority, to no avail. Despite his skirmish with the authorities, the alleged chemist began to gain fame among the followers of the chemical solution. He participated in a congress called Spirit of Health in Hannover, Germany, in 2014, and his book continued to be widely read. On his website, Kalcker posted a court record certificate issued in Spain which shows he has no pending issues with the law.
Around this time, before Covid-19 arrived, Kalcker and Humble were selling their potions claiming to cure autism. With words that mimicked the language of medicine – although neither had been trained as doctors – they claimed that autism was the result of “parasitosis” and the accumulation of heavy metals, supposedly caused by vaccines.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a developmental disability that can cause cognitive difficulties. But there is no solid scientific evidence in recent years showing that chlorine dioxide can be effective in treating this disability. In Pubmed, the world’s most important database of scientific and health information publications, there is not a single clinical trial or isolated clinical case report that validates its use. Instead, there are numerous reports of its toxicity, including oesophageal ulcers, renal failure, hemolytic anemia and other serious blood disorders, mutagenic effects, and chromosomal aberrations.
Kalcker then went on to create his own websites on which he sold his books and videos and, in addition, offered consultations at $100 per hour. To defend himself against the criticisms that began to fall on him, he argued that the pharmaceutical industry was conspiring against anyone who competed with it, rhetoric that proved very attractive to anti-vaccine activists. As he tapped into these networks, his business grew.
In 2013, a family in Granada, in southern Spain, denounced Kalcker and others because the remedy they had recommended to their mother to cure arthritis had produced, according to her, “dry skin, ulcers in the cornea of the eyes, vomiting, nausea, diarrhea”. Kalcker and other defendants were acquitted. Afterwards, the alchemist left Spain.
He moved to a small Swiss village called Sennwald, on the border with Liechtenstein. A few years later, with the Grenons behind bars and the church in disarray, “Bishop” Kalcker looked for another organization to boost the business at a perfect time. It was May 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading around the world, leaving thousands of victims. People’s bewilderment, with no cure in sight, was the perfect environment to revive CDS sales. His videos became popular on social networks, attracting thousands of people. His medical-speak, delivered without hesitation, contrasted with the caution with which real scientists shared what they were learning about the virus.
Miraculously, as Kalcker has recounted, it was at that time that he was contacted by a retired Ecuadorian military officer, founder of the Global Coalition for Health and Life (Comusav).
Kalcker finds new allies
Former Colonel Guillermo Tamayo says he began taking chlorine dioxide in January 2020, when he was still in active duty and his troops were at risk of contracting the new virus, which in Guayaquil was killing thousands of people.
As he has reiterated in several virtual spaces, Tamayo wrote to Kalcker to tell him that his troops and himself had avoided infection thanks to chlorine dioxide. The latter put him in contact with Aememi, the Ecuadorian Association of Medical Experts in Integrative Medicine, a group of homeopathic and alternative therapy doctors who were already using the chemical solution to treat patients. They recruited several doctors to their cause. Five months later, the former military man founded the Global Coalition for Health and Life, Comusav, together with Tannia Bayas, an Ecuadorian living in Spain who describes herself on social networks as a “beauty coach,” and Gonzalo Arcos, an Ecuadorian alternative therapist. The three invited Kalcker to become an honorary member.
The former colonel’s story does not match the dates because the peak of the pandemic in Guayaquil was in March 2020. In addition, Bayas assures that it was her, and not Tamayo, who was behind the initiative. In any case, the Ecuadorians soon disappeared from the leadership of the Comusav. Tamayo founded another organization, Conuvive (Concilio de Naciones Unidas por la Vida y la Verdad) because, as he said in another interview, in Comusav there were only doctors and he “had the vision of creating an army of lawyers, doctors, communicators”. Instead, Kalcker took the de facto leadership of Comusav because of his “scientific” contribution, even though formally he was only an “honorary member”.
This journalistic alliance found connections between several Comusav allies in the region and a business network in Europe. Several of these companies register Kalcker’s home address in Switzerland.
Andreas Kalcker’s address, as stated on many Swiss registries, is Läui 22, Sennwald, Sankt Gallen, 9466, the same address that serves as headquarters of a tangle of companies. MedaLAB Swiss GmbH, which sells alternative therapy devices designed by Kalcker himself, is registered there. He is listed here as managing director.
MedaLAB is related to another company, MedaTECH, via the registered contact URL medatech.ch. This company was based in Wollerau, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz, and was liquidated in 2020. It sought to “develop electromagnetic devices”.
On the books of both companies is Martin Vetsch, Kalcker’s Swiss partner who, in addition to promoting his companies’ machines, has also pushed chlorine dioxide as a cure for autism and Covid-19.
Vetsch was interviewed by Fiona O’Leary, an Irish activist in defense of the rights of people with autism who has also been fighting against those who seek to cure this condition with chlorine dioxide because of the damage it can cause. She told this journalistic team that Vetsch told her that his company sells a chlorine dioxide generator and that his machines can cure autism.
On the comusav.de website, the same address of Kalcker in Sennwald is given as the address of “Comusav International”. This is the same address of MedaLAB, Martin Vetsch’s company. On that Comusav page Walter Vetsch is listed as the person legally responsible. A Walter Vetsch is also listed as a member of the board of directors of the real estate company blue24immo, AG, where Martin Vetsch is also listed. About this, Kalcker told us that “an official address of COMUSAV Worldwide Switzerland does not exist yet nor is Walter Vetsch a partner of mine”.
But the evidence shows that Kalcker and Martin Vetsch are selling devices from Kalcker’s house in Sennwald to create chlorine dioxide and to supposedly cure autism, taking advantage of the misinformation spread by Comusav International, an organization registered at the same address.
It doesn’t stop there
In May 2021, the Swiss media Beobachter visited the address in Sennwald and found on the mailbox, in addition to Kalcker’s name, that of Eduardo Insignares Carrione (Carrione is how it appears in the Colombian registry of human talent in health). Carrione was president of Comusav Colombia and is now director of research at COMUSAV Worldwide. He also claimed to have conducted a study on chlorine dioxide in Bogota, which supposedly validated the hypothesis of the chemical’s usefulness in treating coronavirus.
Insignares answered a questionnaire from this journalistic alliance and said that he only contacted Kalcker after the onset of the pandemic and it was he who proposed “that we do an investigation to verify if it really worked”. For his part, Kalcker has said several times (including in an interview with that Swiss outlet) that he had nothing to do with the Insignares study, although at that time they were already partners in several initiatives.
The study that Insignares led claims to have been funded by the Genesis Foundation. Despite the coincidence in name, the foundation has no relation to the Genesis II church and, in fact, was founded before the church. It appeared in Colombia in 1999, according to that country’s commercial registry, with the objective of “providing support services to sick people, especially chronically or terminally ill, in health, educational, financial, housing (and) social aspects.” In 2006, Insignares appeared as a representative of the foundation at a congress on enneagrams, a practice that seeks to study human personality. Now, the foundation sells diplomas for up to $900 per person, from an academy where Insignares, his wife Blanca Bolaño and Kalcker teach about the use of chlorine dioxide.
The three are also the authors of an earlier article, published in the same journal in which Insignares’ alleged 2020 study appeared. In this article (which claims to have been funded by its authors), Bolaño signs off as research director of the Genesis Foundation, Insignares as global research director of the Liechtensteiner Verein für Wissenschaft und Gesundheit (or Liechtenstein Association for Science and Health), and Kalcker as the administrative director of the same association as well as biophysics researcher at the “SVNB”.
Although the principality of Liechtenstein has been an independent country since the 18th century, in several documents of the association, including the study by Kalcker, Insignares and Bolaño, they give its location as “Liechtenstein, Switzerland”. According to their website, the true address of the association (the name of which is usually abbreviated as LVWG) was, as of September 2021, Industriering 14, Rugell, 9491. This is a place that can be reached in seven minutes by car from Kalcker’s address in Sennwald and is also the address of a hotel called Kommod. As quoted in the Swiss newspaper article, the only sign of LVWG’s presence there is a mailbox.
Currently, the address given by the association is Sportfeldstrasse 11, 9493, Mauren, towards the center of the small country. But this same location is registered to a company called Rhetaca Reitsport Anstalt, which is involved in equestrianism and has a riding arena.
When asked about his role in this scheme, Insignares emphatically assured: “I am neither a partner nor an employee of any company of Andreas Kalcker”, and that when entering Switzerland “it was necessary to put a temporary address and the address of the Swiss association of biophysics was put for the purpose of registering my documents as an Italian in Switzerland”.
This association refers to the “SVNB”, the Schweizer Verein für Naturwissenschaftliche Biophysik (or Swiss Association for Scientific Biophysics), of which Kalcker claims to be administrative director, although this has an address in a different Swiss city, Buchs. An October 2019 statute of the association names three members: Martin Vetsch, Rama Karni (Kalcker’s wife), and Elisabeth Mariani (a Swiss health “coach” who graduated from Kalcker’s biophysics diploma program).
SVNB, which is now in liquidation, could follow the fate of another similar company: in 2016 Urs Odermatt, a Swiss entrepreneur Kalcker met at a seminar, Turkish businessman Zeynal Uz and Bulgarian entrepreneur Boyka Angelov set up another company, called Schweizer Zentrum für Wissenschaftliche Forschung, Innovation und Entwicklung AG (SZWFIE, or Swiss Center for Research, Innovation and Scientific Development), to do research in biophysics and pharmaceuticals. They were joined by fellow Swiss investor Samuel Gauro.
In February 2019, German broadcaster ZDF visited the address of the alleged research center in Grabs, Switzerland, and found a multi-office building where no one knew Kalcker. At this center Kalcker had a salary of 10,000 Swiss francs (about $11,000) per month and received other funds for his work, but failed to show any progress, investor Gauro told Swiss media outlet Beobachter. Even entrepreneur Angelov said Kalcker was incapable of conducting serious scientific research.
The partners entered in disputes and in 2019 the Center filed for bankruptcy. It was liquidated in 2020. However, two of its members did join Kalcker and Vetsch’s complicated web. From 2018 until its liquidation, Odermatt and Uz appeared as managing directors of Medatech, Vetsch’s company mentioned earlier.
On the other hand, SVNB was created only a few days after the bankruptcy of SZWFIE was declared. However, Kalcker applied for three patents as part of the original Swiss research center, one of which is for a pharmaceutical substance based on chlorine dioxide to “treat infectious diseases.” The patent was registered, a fact that does not imply that an invention works, and Kalcker promotes it on his website as a “pharmaceutical composition for the treatment of Covid-19”.
So Kalcker used his contacts in Switzerland to create companies that tried to legitimize his studies on chlorine dioxide and other pseudotherapies. Other associates of his conducted studies that prove nothing, but which his followers consider legitimate. They consider them so because they have followed Comusav’s disinformation. Kalcker then sells to those same followers the machines his companies make, as well as seminars, DVDs and books that explain how to use them. Incidentally, in the courses he also tells his fans that those who warn of the great risks of using this chemical as a medicine are not honest people, thus ensuring he loses no customers. (See Article The science that chlorine dioxide propagators do master).
Kalcker had already used in Spain this strategy of creating a tangle of companies, giving the appearance of a large conglomerate to help his sales. In Alcalá de Xivert, a small Valencian town, he created the company Voicedialogo SL, which includes Voedia, the publishing house that publishes Kalcker’s and others’ books on chlorine dioxide. Its administrator is Dolores Unzu, the person was denounced in Granada together with Kalcker for the case of an elderly woman with arthritis who took chlorine dioxide and developed ulcers (See video “Testimonies of victims”), and in which they were acquitted. Unzu presents herself as “Organizer and Coordinator of national and international events” for Andreas Kalcker. In that town, he also created the company Rincón del Edén SL, of which he is still manager and whose corporate purpose is to carry out activities in amusement parks, as well as Kalcker SL, a company of “wholesale trade of radio and electronic equipment and material”.
In addition to this, in the city of Castellón is registered Medalab Research SL, the original version of the Swiss company of the same name that sells the same devices for alternative therapies, at roughly 800 euros a piece. Listed as managers of this company are Kalcker, Miriam Carrasco Maceda (his ex-wife) and Elena Valladares (Carrasco was in the company until 2018, while Kalcker took over for 13 days that year until Valladares’ arrival).
Valladares is listed as co-author -with Kalcker- of a March 2020 LVWG academic paper on chlorine dioxide toxicity. She is also manager of another company, Mydioxi SL, where Unzu is also manager. For her part, until November 2020 Carrasco was listed as the sole partner of Mebenezer Lab Sociedad Limitada, whose activity is the “production of chemical products and biocides” and which sells chlorine dioxide through its brand Dioxilife, although it promotes it as a disinfectant. Now it is Odermatt that appears as the sole partner.
When asked about this business strategy, Andreas Kalcker responded: “Both you and I are free to create companies and in my case I do not use my companies to promote lies … I do believe in the benefits of chlorine dioxide and there would not be a specific law on CDS in Bolivia if this were false”.
Insignares, who shares a mailbox in Switzerland with Kalcker, is also part of this scheme, besides participating in Comusav and in the other activities mentioned above together with Kalcker. In Colombia he has a company called Magnofarma SAS, which offers alternative medicinal therapies. On its website, Magnofarma briefly mentions “oxidative therapies”, the disguised name by which the “therapeutic” use of chlorine dioxide is sometimes referred to. It also refers to vibrational therapies with high frequencies, such as those promised by the devices sold by Medalab.
Insignares, in addition, opened other companies called Magnopharma: one in the United States and one in Slovakia, as well as two different companies called Nutricell in the United States and a registered medical office in an office building in Marbella, Spain – the latter being the only one of all these companies that is still active or in which his participation is still in force. In that Andalusian city, as he said in a 2020 interview, he was planning to open a “clinic” together with Kalcker.
When asked if these connections called into question his trustworthiness as an independent researcher, Insignares replied: “I am independent and I have been so to avoid accusations of being financed by business interests. This is a historic moment in humanity to act, to help, to serve. Many of those who criticize haven’t produced a mere soap to alleviate human pain”.
After the congresses of Latin America
With their wires well connected to the Comusav, Andreas Kalcker and his allies have made the America. The chain started by retired Ecuadorian military officer with his country’s alternative practitioners soon extended an arm into Bolivia. In May 2020, when Covid-19 was raging in Beni, a hot, Amazonian department in northeastern Bolivia, a delegation of supportive doctors traveled there to replace colleagues who had fallen ill. Among them was Patricia Callisperis. She convinced other doctors that dioxide would cure the fatal virus and began to administer it left and right.
Interviewed by this journalistic team, Jorge Gómez, a doctor who at that time was the director of the Departmental Health Service (SEDES) of Beni, told of the cost of the experiment: “We asked the doctor to leave the hospital because there were many people intoxicated or dying because they abandoned their treatment after ingesting chlorine dioxide,” he said. “We don’t know how much impact CDS really caused because autopsies were not performed (…) but I maintain that this mixture was very harmful to the population that I understand was desperate.”
In early July, people close to Comusav Bolivia introduced a bill to authorize the use of CDS, and by October they had succeeded in getting it passed into law.
Since July 2020, the Comusav group had already begun to gain political allies. The first was Eliseo Azuero, then vice-president of the political control commission of the Legislative Assembly of Ecuador. This was a politician of long standing who had changed parties like a chameleon changes color – the last party was one of his own creation, called BADI – and who promoted chlorine dioxide on video. Together with Kalcker, Azuero got the presidents of several national chapters of Comusav, which had already expanded to several Latin American countries, a virtual hearing before the Ecuadorian deputies. That hearing, curiously, occurred on the same day that Grenon was arrested in Colombia, July 8. Although Azuero is now a fugitive from justice accused of leading a scheme to keep money destined for the construction of a hospital, the propaganda was so widespread that days later, ten Catholic bishops from different regions asked President Lenín Moreno for the head of the health minister and to authorize the medical use of the CDS.
Meanwhile, in Peru they managed to get a congresswoman from Huánuco of the Acción Popular party (a party with a broad spectrum between the center and the right) to schedule a hearing for Comusav’s members at the Health Commission of that country, but the news of this created a scandal in the media and among Peruvian scientists, and the meeting was finally cancelled. However, at the behest of then parliament member Posemoscrowte Chagua, a parliamentary commission investigated the impacts of the chemical used as a medicine. Although the commission concluded that there is no evidence to support its medicinal use, it called for disciplinary proceedings to be suspended against the doctors who prescribed it to their patients.
This united front with which Comusav reached these congresses at the beginning of the pandemic, went through a crisis in February 2021, when the leaders of the organization from Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Guatemala sent a letter announcing the creation of a new organization: Comusav America. As Luis Revollo, president of Comusav Bolivia, explained to this journalistic alliance, “We were looking to do science. [Kalcker] went with Karla Revollo [now communications director of Kalcker’s Comusav] to look for money. If I remember correctly, we charged 100 bolivianos [$14] for the course. They were charging 800 or 1000 bolivianos [$116 to $145] for Andreas’ talk.”
So, after that date, Comusav became two different organizations: Kalcker is behind Comusav Mundial, which focused its operations in Mexico, Colombia, Spain and the Spanish-speaking community in the United States; while the countries that signed the charter organized in the new Comusav America, which has little presence in social networks. In any case, the new Comusav continues to sell chlorine dioxide and criticizes Kalcker’s Comusav for selling the substance as a miracle cure and for relying on the Insignares study, which according to them “lacks credibility”. And both organizations continued to seek a way into Latin American congresses.
In the state of Nuevo Leon in Mexico, an aspiring PRI congressional candidate, allied with an anti-vaccine organization, presented to the state Congress an initiative to investigate the medical applications of chlorine dioxide and to initiate a dialogue with Comusav. This was rejected the first time, but at the insistence of lobbyists, they managed to get it approved in March 2021. Working hand in hand with a different party, the PAN, they had arrived in December 2020 to the Congress of the neighboring state of Coahuila with a similar proposal. And two months later, in February 2021, a businessman leader of the National Anti-Amlo Front, Pedro Martín, invited Kalcker to the city of Francisco I. Moreno, in that same state, where Mayor Jonathan Ávalos has promoted the use of CDS as a remedy. Martin also promised to donate a building to Kalcker in the city of Torreon, also in Coahuila.
On November 13th, 2021, another businessman, Moises Rosado, through his association Obra Libre de Adicciones, donated to Comusav a building in Zapopan, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, with the promise that the first Andreas Kalcker Research Center in Latin America will be opened there. According to a notice printed on a white piece of paper, the foundation is “under renovation”, although there is already a pharmacy in the building that sells chlorine dioxide for medicinal use. The payments go to the account of the association of businessman Rosado, as was verified by members of this journalistic alliance who visited the place.
In Colombia, the key to the Legislature was opened by a member of the House of Representatives of the evangelical Colombia Justa Libres party, Carlos Eduardo Acosta, who allowed several representatives of the Ecuadorian and Paraguayan chapters of Comusav to participate in a session on December 9th, 2021. The session was intended to put into question an initiative requiring vaccination certificates in public places. No one mentioned chlorine dioxide, but they did repeat the usual conspiratorial diatribes against vaccines and defended alternative therapies.
In Argentina, Francisco Sanchez, a national deputy for the right-wing Patagonian province of Neuquén and activist of the PRO (right-wing party), admired by Eduardo Bolsonaro (son of the Brazilian president), appears as one of the leaders of Comusav in that country.
Other promoters of Comusav and of Kalcker’s inventions have organized conferences in Guatemala (where they had mayor of Guastastoga testify about the miraculous solution), offered a great concert of Artists United for Life in Guadalajara, and requested hearings and opportunities to promulgate the risky medicine in Costa Rica.
Even in the United States, with the ban there on the medicinal use of chlorine dioxide, a real estate salesman named Ricardo Garcia who claims to have studied chemistry at the University of Havana in Cuba, registered the OCLO 3000 trademark under his company OCLO LLC and sold it until authorities ordered him to stop. All his propaganda was based on Kalcker’s allegedly scientific findings.
At the same time, defying the legal ban on selling chlorine dioxide as medicine in the United States, Comusav itself created networks on Telegram in Spanish and English aimed at captivating Americans and had managed to hook more than 50 thousand by December 2021.
About this strategy, Kalcker told us that “these are global plans of many thousands of doctors to have a universal medical antidote and tool for the population, and the poor above all, and they are not local.” He also said that this was part of a desire to “give humanity health, better quality of life and protection, and leaving my legacy in this way.”
And yet false scientific findings continue to pave the way for chlorine dioxide. And behind them follow their organizations – if you can so call each group they set up with a social media or chat room account, a website and sometimes a visible face as president.
These organizations, as this investigation shows with multiple examples, open the doors for business by getting complicit winks in politics, legal authorizations to expand the operation, and even blessings from Catholic bishops.