Head of Florida ‘church’ that sold bleach as COVID-19 cure faces fraud charges in Miami

MARK GRENON, 64, WHO WAS RECENTLY EXTRADITED FROM COLOMBIA BUT IS ORIGINALLY FROM BRADENTON, HAS BEEN CHARGED ALONG WITH HIS THREE SONS.

A Florida man who had been on the lam for a couple of years faced charges in Miami federal court in Thursday of selling a toxic industrial bleach called “Miracle Mineral Solution” on a “church” website, claiming it to be a cure for COVID-19, cancer and other diseases, U.S. authorities said.

Mark Grenon, 64, who was recently extradited from Colombia but is originally from Bradenton, has been charged along with his three sons: Jonathan Grenon, 36, Jordan Grenon, 28, and Joseph Grenon, 34. Arrested over the past two years, the sons have been detained in a federal lock-up and pleaded not guilty to an indictment accusing them and their father of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and criminal contempt.

The three sons are representing themselves. But U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga appointed stand-by lawyers for them if they change their minds.

Mark Grenon, who had fled to Colombia as the criminal case unfolded, could not be reached for comments and no attorney was listed for him on the court docket.

Federal agencies, including the Food and

Drug Administration, had issued warnings about Miracle Mineral Solution to the Grenons, who are accused of selling the illegal chemical product under the cover of a “church” website.

“The Grenons sold tens of thousands of bottles of MMS nationwide, including to consumers throughout South Florida,” prosecutors said in a statement. “They sold this dangerous product under the guise of Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, an entity they are accused of creating to avoid government regulation of MMS and shield themselves from prosecution.”

Before the sons’ arrests, federal prosecutors in Miami obtained a temporary injunction in April 2020 stopping the sale of the potentially dangerous drug in the first federal enforcement action since the COVID-19 pandemic hit South Florida. The indictment accuses the Grenons of violating that order.

The injunction was filed as a complaint accusing Genesis II Church of Health and Healing and its principals of selling and distributing the illegal product, Miracle Mineral Solution. The complaint named the Genesis “church” — actually a Florida-based company that sold the MMS product through its website — as a defendant, along with Grenon and his three sons. Mark Grenon described himself as a “bishop” on the Genesis website.

Genesis, which operated out of an address in Bradenton and did business in South Florida, described itself on a website as “a nonreligious church … focus[ing] on ‘restoring health’ to the world” that “was formed for the purpose of serving mankind and not for the purpose of worship.”

According to a criminal complaint filed in June 2020, Genesis’ own websites described itself as a “non-religious church,” and Mark Grenon, the co-founder of Genesis, repeatedly acknowledged that Genesis “has nothing to do with religion,” and that he founded Genesis a decade earlier to “legalize the use of MMS” and avoid “going ... to jail.”

Prosecutors said Miracle Mineral Solution was sold by Genesis as a chemical product that, when combined with an activator, created a powerful bleach product that the Grenons marketed for oral ingestion. Additionally, they asserted that MMS’s labeling was false, misleading and misbranded.

MMS is a chemical solution containing sodium chlorite and water which, when ingested orally, became chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper.

The indictment, filed last year, alleged that “before marketing MMS as a cure for COVID-19, the Grenons marketed MMS as a miracle cure-all for dozens of other serious diseases and disorders, even though the Food and Drug Administration had not approved MMS for any use.

The FDA had previously issued public warnings to consumers that MMS can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration. In April 2020, the FDA and Federal Trade Commission issued a warning letter to Genesis and its principals notifying them that they were violating federal law by distributing unapproved and misbranded drugs in interstate commerce.

“Despite a previous warning, the Genesis II Church of Healing has continued to actively place consumers at risk by peddling potentially dangerous and unapproved chlorine dioxide products,” FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn said in a statement at the time.