I need to start with the thing that should be the headline, not the footnote; parents are giving children bleach. Not as a metaphor or hyperbole. Actual bleach, administered by mouth and by enema, on a schedule some of them time to the phases of the moon. They are doing it because they have been told, by people who present themselves as healers, that this is how you get rid of an Autistic child and get a “recovered” one back.

I am not interested in softening that sentence for you. The Ecosystemic Model has taught me that distress is never just personal, it’s structural; but sometimes the structure is a bottle of industrial bleach sold through a Telegram channel, and the ecosystem is a parent’s terror weaponised for profit. Let’s take this apart properly.

What Chlorine Dioxide Actually Is

Chlorine dioxide is not some obscure “alternative” compound. It’s an industrial bleaching agent, most commonly used in water treatment and paper pulp processing. When sold as “Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS), “CD”, “CDS”, or “Water Purification Solution”, it’s typically a sodium chlorite solution that the buyer is instructed to mix with a citric acid activator that when added to the mixture becomes chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleaching agent (Disability Scoop, 2019) . There is no reframing of that chemistry that makes it something other than what it is. It is bleach, it was never not bleach.

Who Started Feeding This To Autistic Children

The origin story matters, because it tells you everything about the epistemics of this movement. MMS was first promoted roughly twenty years ago as a remedy for nearly every ailment by a former Scientologist who went on to found a “church of health and healing” called Genesis II (NBC News); that man is Jim Humble, and I want you to sit with the fact that he has claimed, in his own videos, to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy (ABC7 News) . This is the foundational figure of the movement that later got aimed at Autistic children.

The person who did the aiming was Kerri Rivera, a former real estate agent from Chicago (NBC News) with no medical training, who relocated her operation to Mexico and began counselling parents of Autistic children on a “miracle treatment” she claimed could rid their children of what she called “the curse” (NBC Chicago) of autism. Rivera folded chlorine dioxide into a wider “CD protocol” that also involves a strict diet and instructions for parents to watch for the “purging” of parasites from their children’s bodies (NBC Chicago) , and she has claimed the protocol has removed more than 170 children from the autism spectrum (NBC Chicago) . She has also framed autism itself as vaccine injury (Substack) , which tells you she is not operating from one piece of misinformation but from an entire alternate epistemology built to justify the next one.

What should chill you more than the individual biography is the theology underneath it. Rivera’s protocol timed doses to the full moon, on the claim that parasites “wreak havoc” in the guts of Autistic children every 29 days (ABC7 News) . This is astrology dressed as clinical protocol, and it has been sold to terrified parents as science.

The Philosophical And Ethical Rot At The Centre Of “Fake Cures”

Here is where I want to slow down, because the technical fraud is almost the least interesting part of this to me, the deeper violence is philosophical.

A “cure” for autism requires a prior claim; that Autistic existence is itself the pathology, the thing to be eliminated, rather than one configuration of a bodymind moving through a world built for someone else’s neurology. Every “cure” narrative smuggles in an ontology where the Autistic child, as they actually are, is understood as an absence, a “real” (implicitly non-Autistic) child trapped inside, injured, poisoned, and waiting to be extracted. Rivera’s own language (“removed from the spectrum,” “recovered”) depends entirely on this framing. It cannot exist without it.

This is where epistemic injustice, in Fricker’s sense, does its quiet work. Autistic people are testimonially discredited as narrators of our own existence before the conversation even starts, because the premise of “cure” culture requires that our lived, embodied Autistic experience be treated as noise generated by toxins, not as a legitimate way of being a person. The parent is positioned as the only credible witness, the child is positioned as evidence of damage. Nobody in that room is listening to what an Autistic child’s distress or joy might actually be trying to communicate, because the protocol has already decided what it is; parasites, heavy metals, vaccine injury, anything except a person.

That’s the ethical crime underneath the biochemical one. Before anyone administers a single dose, the ideology has already erased the child as a legitimate subject.

The Evidence Base That Doesn’t Exist

There isn’t one. This needs to be said plainly and repeatedly, because “controversial” and “alternative” get used by media coverage in ways that imply a genuine scientific disagreement. There isn’t one. There have never been any clinical trials, and neither Humble nor Rivera (who is a real estate agent, not a doctor) have cited any studies supporting their claims (Altogether Autism).

Regulatory and public health bodies across multiple countries have independently reached the same conclusion. Formal statements against chlorine dioxide/bleach therapy have been issued by bodies including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the FDA repeatedly since 2010, alongside equivalent warnings from health agencies in Brazil and the UK, and from the WHO. This is not one lone dissenting institution being cautious. This is the near-total consensus of every body whose job it is to evaluate exactly this kind of claim.

The Actual Physical Harm

The FDA has been direct about what ingesting this substance does to a human body. People who have ingested chlorine dioxide solutions have experienced severe vomiting, severe diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure, dehydration, and acute liver failure all signs of bleach poisoning. Wider reporting on associated products adds seizures and respiratory problems to that list. Poison control centres in the US alone managed more than 16,000 related cases over a five-year period, fifty of them life-threatening, and eight of them fatal (NBC News).

Sixteen thousand cases. Fifty life-threatening. Eight deaths. These figures cover general MMS use across all claimed applications; cancer, HIV, malaria, meaning the true count of Autistic children specifically harmed by the autism-targeted protocol sits somewhere inside that data, uncounted and unspecified, because nobody with power has thought it urgent enough to isolate.

The Trauma, And Who Actually Carries It

I want to widen the lens here, because most coverage of this stops at the child directly forced to drink or receive the enemas. That trauma is real, is bodily, is unforgivable, and I’m not going to minimise it by moving past it quickly. A child’s gut lining chemically burned by a caregiver who believed they were healing them is a trauma that doesn’t end when the protocol does. It lives in the bodymind and reorganises how that child relates to their own parent, their own body, their own safety, for the rest of their life.

There’s also a second wound here, (and it’s one that almost never gets named); the trauma carried by Autistic people who are not being subjected to this, but who are watching it happen. Every news story, every underground forum screenshot, every “recovery” testimonial that surfaces online lands on Autistic adults and Autistic children who are not in that specific room, but who understand with total clarity what it means that people are willing to do this to children who exist just like they do. It is a direct, ambient message; your kind of mind is considered so intolerable that some parents would rather risk liver failure and death than let it persist.

That’s not abstract, that is a community-wide minority stress event, delivered on a rolling basis, indefinitely, with no ending point, because the ideology producing it isn’t going away.

This is the ecosystemic reality of “cure” culture. It doesn’t just harm the child in the room, it reaches every Autistic person who has to keep existing in a culture where this is a live, ongoing, socially tolerated practice, still being defended, still being sold.

The Commodification Of Fear

Which brings me to the part I find hardest to write about without real anger:m; this is a business model.

Rivera has claimed to have sold tens of thousands of copies of a book promoting her chlorine dioxide protocol (NBC News), a book that was eventually pulled from Amazon after sustained public pressure, our own organisation among those pushing for its removal.

There are clinics and paid consultations. Protocol guides, supplement bundles, membership communities, and a thriving underground network of parents sharing photographs and video of supposed “purged parasites” (ABC7 News) as a form of social proof, driving the next parent to buy in.

None of this exists because the science is ambiguous, it exists because desperation is a market, and Autistic children are the product being extracted from it. Parents arrive frightened, often isolated, often failed by underfunded and inaccessible support systems that leave them with nowhere else to turn; and into that vacuum step people selling certainty (not evidence, certainty). “I can fix this”. That sentence, sold to a terrified parent by someone with no clinical qualification and no data, is the entire business.

The structural failure that makes this possible isn’t just the con artists at the centre of it. It’s every system upstream that leaves parents so unsupported, so unheard, so starved of accurate information about what autism actually is, that a bottle of bleach and a lunar calendar starts to look like the only option left on the table. That’s the ecosystem this violence grows in, you don’t fix it by only prosecuting Kerri Rivera. You fix it by dismantling the conditions that make her business model viable in the first plac; by insisting, loudly and without compromise, that Autistic children are not raw material for anyone’s profit margin.