Trump golf club to host speaker who markets bleach as health treatment

 

Donald Trump’s private golf resort in South Florida will next week host one of the world’s leading purveyors of chlorine dioxide, a potentially life-threatening form of industrial bleach that is claimed without evidence to be a cure for cancer, Covid and autism.

Andreas Kalcker is among 50 listed speakers at the “Truth Seekers Conference”, a two-day event opening on Thursday at the US president’s resort, Trump National Doral Miami. The event features several anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists who have been brought together by the far-right commentator Charlie Ward.

Kalcker, a German national thought to be living in Switzerland, markets the bleach under the brand name “CDS”, for chlorine dioxide solution. His online brochures claim that the toxic chemical, which he admits is a disinfectant, can “eliminate pathogens” that cause disease.

He boasts it is “possibly the greatest medical discovery of the last 100 years”.

Government health authorities in the US and Spain have denounced the remedy as fraudulent, saying it is no different from drinking bleach. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that it can cause serious and even life-threatening side-effects, including dehydration, diarrhoea and kidney injury.

Kalcker’s appearance at Thursday’s conference is the latest indication that potentially dangerous alternative health approaches are being emboldened and are proliferating during Trump’s second term in the White House. The US president’s choice of the prominent vaccine skeptic, Robert Kennedy Jr, to head the Department of Health and Human Services has spread alarm through medical circles.

Kennedy, who until 2023 led the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, has talked about treating the current measles outbreak in Texas with cod liver oil. He also praised without any evidence two doctors in Texas whom he claimed had “healed” 300 children with measles using the inhaled steroid budesonide.

At his confirmation hearings for the health secretary job, Kennedy directly mentioned chlorine dioxide. He praised Trump’s handling of pandemic, saying the president had not only speeded up the search for a Covid vaccine but had looked at “all of the different remedies including … even chlorine dioxide”

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