Doctor who prescribed MMS bleach potion voluntarily struck off

Dr Finbar Magee

Last year, Prime Time reported that Belfast doctor Finbar Magee directed a controversial bleach solution MMS be given to a Dublin child with autism. He has just been voluntarily struck off by the UK’s General Medical Council, before a fitness to practice hearing was due to open in November. 

Read the background to the story below.

See the Prime Time report on Dr Magee, broadcast on 14 May 2015 here

See the original Prime Time exposé, Bleach Cult’, broadcast 8 April 2015, on the dangers of MMS, the Genesis II cult behind it, its founder Jim Humble and undercover filming of its attempts to push the product here.

The General Medical Council had been investigating Dr Magee following a 2015 'Prime Time’ report, which revealed that the Belfast-based doctor directed MMS be given to a three-year-old Dublin child with autism in 2011. In correspondence with Prime Time Dr Magee defended MMS as well as other controversial treatments.  

In October 2015, the GMC suspended his licence on an interim basis while it continued its investigations. Arising out of those, he had been due to appear before a fitness to practice hearing of its Medical Practitioners Tribunal this November. However, in advance of that,Mr Magee himself applied for erasure from the medical register and the GMC accepted a voluntary strike off. He has been a doctor since 1987. 

With immediate effect, Finbar Magee no longer has a licence to practice medicine and is no longer permitted to work as a doctor in the UK or in Northern Ireland, in private or public practice.  Doctors removed from the register can no longer hold themselves out to be a doctor - any attempt to do so would be a criminal offence.

Last year’s Prime Time report on Dr Magee followed up on its documentary, ‘Bleach Cult’ in which reporter Rita O’Reilly (with producer Brídóg Ní Bhuachalla) exposed the promotion of MMS, online and in Ireland. The industrial bleach solution is pushed as a cure-all for disease, but also as a 'miracle cure’ for autism.  Prime Time had been alerted to MMS by a vigilant autism campaigner, Cork woman Fiona O'Leary.

The main promoter of MMS is a former gold prospector from the USA, Jim Humble.  In 2010, Humble, an ex-Scientologist, founded a church, Genesis II. A ‘church’ with no religion, it claims to ‘heal the sick’.

Its cure all is MMS – Master Mineral Solution, or Miracle Mineral Supplement - which has other brand names and variants, like CDS or the CD protocol. It is sold in different forms – and pushed through seminars and a glut of websites and facebook pages, public and private, across several languages and countries – including Ireland - always with a price to be paid.

Humble’s recipe is to mix sodium chlorite with an activator like citric acid to make chlorine dioxide. Sodium chlorite is an industrial bleach and disinfectant; oxidising, corrosive and harmful to the human body.  

Prime Time submitted MMS for testing to the Health Service Executive's (HSE's) Public Analysts Laboratory based at University Hospital Galway. The Public Analysts Lab found the mixed MMS solution contained 90% chlorite and 10% chlorine dioxide. 

It found that when MMS instructions were followed and the sodium chlorite was mixed with citric acid and diluted with water, about 90% of it stayed as chlorite. The World Health Organisation sets maximum levels for chlorite in drinking water: its limit is less than 1 milligram per litre, but the lab found the level of chlorite in activated MMS was 391 milligrams per litre. It is this solution that goes into people’s bodies.

When Prime Time prepared its follow-up report on the Belfast doctor, Finbar Magee, it went back to the Public Analysts Lab. A WHO–UN expert committee also sets acceptable daily intake levels for chlorite. Its limit is close to zero (0-0.03 mg/kg chlorite). Dr Magee had written instructions on what intake of MMS the three-year-old child was to be given. Prime Time showed Dr Magee's instructions to the Public Analyst's Lab and it calculated that if his instructions had been followed, within a week, each day, the child would have been ingesting 433 times the acceptable daily limit for chlorite set by the WHO experts. Or, to put it another way, over three months, even with gaps of two weeks as prescribed, she would have ingested a daily average of 128 times the maximum level.

Luckily, her mother did not follow the doctor's advice, and never gave her child MMS. 

When we broadcast our report on Dr Finbar Magee, he declined to be interviewed. He told us he had prescribed MMS to very few patients, "maybe six at most" and had not prescribed it for “a couple of years, maybe even longer” because of “concern over potential problems and the fact it is controversial”.  However, he got back to us repeatedly, defending MMS and other controversial treatments. He said MMS is “one of many oxidising agents used to try to kill viruses, bacteria and fungi” and compared its safety to water purification products.

On the internet, MMS is heavily marketed. Jim Humble's sales pitch feeds off anti-medical and anti-vaccine suspicion and doubt. To swallow the Genesis II claims, believers have to take strong doses of conspiracy theory.

At a seminar in Ireland Prime Time filmed undercover, potential recruits were fed a volatile mix of conspiracy and pseudoscience, delivered with a heady cocktail of pseudo-legal language used by the 'freeman' or 'sovereign citizen' movements. 

Along with Jim Humble, Kerry Rivera and Andreas Kalcker make up the holy trinity of MMS marketers. Mr Kalcker is a would-be inventor with no medical background, and has a phony doctorate of philosophy that can be bought online. He pushes a variant of MMS, called CDS. Kerri Rivera runs a clinic offering controversial treatments for autism, including MMS, and defended the product in an interview on Prime Time. 

Jim Humble himself claims he comes from another planet and was a member of a space navy sent to earth to watch over it. However, the MMS product he created does have at least one rational motive: it makes money. Living in self exile in South America in 2010, Mr Humble put the purpose of his 'church' plainly in a letter to his followers: "A church does not need to pay income tax nor be regulated in any way”, he wrote. “The fact is, we are pretty much bullet proof in that no country has any control over us”.

- Rita O'Reilly