How can these journalists be so out of touch that they don't realize how much they are exposing and how much credibility their article gives the thing they are trying to discredit?

Most people VICE World News spoke with in Bolivia had drunk the substance or knew someone who had.

But across Latin America, the use of chlorine dioxide to prevent and treat COVID, and even combat the “toxic effects” of vaccines, has taken off, in forms like sprays and intravenous infusions.

Nowhere has the “treatment” gained as much legitimacy as in Bolivia, where the country’s left-wing government legalized the production and sale of chlorine dioxide last year as an alternative treatment for COVID.

Arce also claimed that the medical establishment refuses to recognize the supposed miraculous powers of chlorine dioxide because they’ve “indoctrinated us to think that’s not possible.” When we asked who he was referring to, Arce said the “dynasties,” and named the Rockefellers, the Morgans (as in J.P. Morgan) and the Rothschilds, all of whom he said “want to maintain their fortunes and their control, their global domination.”

But the law did more than regulate the substance. Universities began producing and selling it. The country’s military academy of engineering, which had already been “studying” it, began marketing and selling chlorine dioxide products to the public, including sprays

The rector of the military academy, Col. Javier Antonio Jiménez Terán, acknowledged the lack of scientific evidence showing chlorine dioxide is effective in treating COVID. Instead, he insisted, repeatedly, that the academy’s lab had proven the concentration of chlorine dioxide in their products isn’t toxic. He called chlorine dioxide an alternative and said the academy is providing a service to the Bolivian people by producing it.

The man credited with discovering the solution’s curative properties, Jim Humble, claimed to have had a vision about it during a 1996 gold-mining expedition to South America. When his colleagues came down with malaria, he gave them drops of the chlorine dioxide water purifier he’d brought. Four hours later, he said, they were miraculously cured.

Humble named his discovery “Miracle Mineral Solution” and began peddling it in Africa and Latin America as a cure for malaria, cancer, and AIDS. In 2010, he founded the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing in Florida in order to scale up its marketing scheme, and to circumvent federal regulators in the U.S.

The pro-bleach movement has made enormous inroads across Latin America. In Argentina, a popular TV anchor drank chlorine dioxide on live television

Their conspiracy narrative that the medical establishment is purposely hiding something in its condemnation of chlorine dioxide found particular resonance in Bolivia. Mistrust of Western medicine, said Soria, the Bolivian epidemiologist, goes back to a U.S. campaign in the 1960s to provide contraceptives across Bolivia’s rural indigenous regions. The idea was to lower the birthrate and, in doing so, address maternal and childhood mortality rates. Locals didn’t see it that way.

“People thought, ‘They want to sterilize us. They want to take over the country,’” Soria said. “That logic began to grow and grow, and the resistance to the health system remains today.”

Col. Enrique Bustamante, who oversees the Military Academy of Engineering’s research and production of chlorine dioxide, even described chlorine dioxide as a “natural medicine” that’s similar to drinking tea.