A clinic in London, run by a former maker of artisanal ice cream, is treating patients with stage 4 cancer using a method that involves sealing them, naked from the neck down, in a plastic bag while gassing them with the oxidizing industrial bleach chlorine dioxide—a treatment that even the person administering it admits is “dangerous.”
Alastair Jessel, who operates the Battersea Park Clinic in south London, spoke earlier this month on a podcast popular among those who believe that chlorine dioxide is a miracle cure that can be used to treat everything from cancer and HIV to Covid-19 and autism.
“Having people naked in a bag, which in a clinic situation is probably what a lot of doctors have to face, but as an entrepreneur sitting in front of a naked person in front of me is something I hadn’t sort of planned on doing in the last few years, but what it’s achieving has been really quite incredible,” Jessel told a podcast focusing on chlorine dioxide earlier this month.
The typical “protocol” sees users ingest several drops of chlorine dioxide solution daily. Jessel is administering a different, little-used “protocol” first posited by Andreas Kalcker, a German man who has been one of the main boosters of the bleach-like solution in recent decades. The treatment includes sealing people naked in a plastic bag from the neck down before exposing them directly to the undiluted gaseous form of chlorine dioxide.
Jessel said in the podcast that he had asked a private messaging group of other chlorine dioxide influencers if anyone had ever tried Kalcker’s so-called Protocol G, and no one responded.
“Protocol G, obviously, is probably the most dangerous protocol out of all of them,” Jessel said, adding: “Nobody’s ever done it. So I don’t know whether I’m the first person in the UK to do it, but I’m definitely a rarity.”
Writing about Protocol G’s uses on his website, Kalcker does not mention cancer treatment. “Properly applied, with the straightforward precaution of avoiding vapor inhalation, it is a well-tolerated procedure,” Kalcker tells WIRED, dismissing Jessel’s description of the treatment as dangerous. While he will not comment on the efficacy of this treatment for all cancers, he says that in relation to skin cancer, Protocol G would be “directly relevant.”
“Currently there is no scientific evidence that chlorine dioxide gas exposure is a safe or effective treatment for people with cancer,” says Caroline Geraghty, senior specialist information nurse at Cancer Research UK. “Taking unproven treatment or remedies for cancer instead of those that are medically approved could affect how well the treatment works and have dangerous side effects. It’s incredibly important that people speak with their cancer doctor, GP, or specialist nurse before trying any alternative remedies.”
Jessel did not respond to a detailed list of questions, simply writing, “I can only refer you to protocol G in Dr Andreas Kalcker’s book Forbidden Health. That is all I do.”
For decades, pseudoscience grifters have peddled chlorine dioxide solutions—sold under a variety of names such as Miracle Mineral Solution—as “cures” for a wide variety of illnesses and disorders. There is no credible evidence to back up any of these claims.
However, over the last year, there has been a resurgence of interest in chlorine dioxide after US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned chlorine dioxide when questioned about President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed during his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025. Then, a year ago, the Food and Drug Administration removed a warning about the substance from its website. While the agency says the removal was part of a routine process of archiving old pages on its site, it has had the effect of emboldening the bleacher community.
Jessel, whose father was knighted by the British royal family, was a stockbroker and owner of a tile business before becoming an ice-cream entrepreneur. With no background in medicine or science, in December 2021 he registered the Battersea Park Clinic with Companies House, initially providing treatment using scalar waves, based on an unproven pseudoscientific concept that suggests invisible energy can help heal a variety of ailments.
Jessel said in an interview on The It’s All Good Show that he became an expert in alternative therapies by watching “probably 150 to 200 hours worth of videos on how to heal people holistically.”
Having discovered that only 70 percent of his clients were seeing benefits from treatments like scalar waves, Jessel says, he began exploring alternative options, adding red-light therapy and a hyperbaric oxygen chamber—something that tennis star Novak Djokovic used when he visited the clinic last summer. A Facebook post on the Battersea Park Clinic account showing Jessel with Djokovic has since been deleted, but a post on Jessel’s personal account on Threads remains online. Djokovic did not respond to a request for comment.
But it was finding out about chlorine dioxide in 2024 that Jessel says was his most important discovery. In an interview with US anti-vaxxer Robert Yoho last year, he called himself “the UK’s Mr. Chlorine Dioxide,” adding that his clinic has “become the go-to holistic place if you have cancer.”
Jessel told The It’s All Good Show that he believes there are nine causes of cancer, including stress and a bad marriage. “We all have cancer growing up every day, but our immune system keeps destroying it,” Jessel said. “When you get stressed, when somebody at work stresses out, when your wife or your husband drives you absolutely mental, and you get stressed, that’s when the cancer appears.”
Jessel initially began posting bottles of chlorine dioxide to his clients to treat cancer and Covid. However, in December 2024 his practice was, according to Jessel, raided by the Food Standards Agency and Trading Standards. “Big Pharma had sent someone with a concealed recording device to secretly record my staff discussing chlorine dioxide,” he alleged to Yoho last year.
WIRED reviewed an email from July last year from a Trading Standards officer which reveals that bottles of chlorine dioxide were found on display in the clinic. A subsequent visit found no bottles for sale, and an employee told an undercover officer the clinic no longer offered it as a treatment.
The Food Standards Agency and the Trading Standards officer who led the investigation last year did not respond to requests for comment.
The UK’s Cancer Act 1939 prohibits nonmedical professionals from advertising treatments or cures for cancer. Around the time Trading Standards was investigating the clinic, references to the efficacy of chlorine dioxide were removed from the clinic’s website, but they can still be viewed on an archived version of the site. The clinic’s Facebook page continues to promote chlorine dioxide, including a link to a talk by Pierre Kory, a prominent anti-vaxxer Kennedy has praised in the past.
“Vulnerable cancer patients are being experimented on, gassed with bleach, naked,” says Fiona O’Leary, an activist based in Ireland who has been highlighting the dangers of chlorine dioxide for years and who reported Jessel’s use of the toxic chemical last year to Trading Standards. “It’s hugely upsetting for those who have experienced cancer in their families, to see this happening and the authorities doing nothing to stop it.”
The Care Quality Commission, which regulates health and adult social care in England, Wandsworth Council, where the clinic is located, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which regulates medicines and medical devices in the UK, did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
In the interview with Yoho last year, Jessel claimed that he was not running his business to make money but to help those struggling financially. But for the daughter of one man who was treated by Jessel using scalar waves, such a claim rings hollow.
“They are manipulative and guiding very vulnerable people away from medical advice and encouraging them to invest a lot of money in these treatments,” says Natalie Passant, who says her father spent approximately $5,000 on treatment at the clinic for advanced prostate cancer in 2024, before he passed away in February 2025.
While Jessel did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Passant’s father’s treatment, he did respond to her criticism on a Google Review that Passant left about his clinic. “I never encouraged your father to forgo essential medical treatment such as radiotherapy,” Jessel wrote. “We do not treat, heal or cure anyone and at no point did I ever sit down with Nigel and give him ‘advice.’”
But Jessel, who has referred to his own clients as “quite stupid” when it comes to being able to administer their own chlorine dioxide treatments, has repeatedly contradicted this statement in podcast appearances where he talks openly about treating, healing, and curing his clients.
“We are treating lots of people for lots of different illnesses,” Jessel told Yoho last year. “I would say now, probably 50 percent of my clients have cancer.”
