VENICE, Fla. — MAGA and MAHA are happily married in Florida, and nowhere more at home than in Sarasota County, where a crowd of several hundred gathered on a humid October night to honor state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, his wife and the unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treats cancer with horse paste.
Event, entitled “Three capital letters: courage, censorship and cancer.”“, sponsored by We, the Center for Health and Well-Beinga clinic funded by the Jan. 6 marchers, where patients can bask under red lights, sit in ozone steam baths, or treat their children for autism with an experimental blood concentrate.
In Venice, Sarasota County, the anti-lockdown “medical freedom” movement unites health advocates, vaccine haters, right-wing Republicans and angry parents in a mix of anti-government absolutism and mystical beliefs.
Ladapo's wife, Brianna, a self-described “spiritual healer” who says she talks to angels and has prophetic visions, led the group at the event at the Venice Community Center. The keynote address was given by William Makis. controversial covid conspirator who, after losing his medical license in 2019, made a living treating cancer patients with anti-parasitic drugs, including ivermectin, which has also been promoted in some circles as a treatment for the coronavirus during the pandemic.
Clinical trials have shown ivermectin doesn't work, but coronavirus skeptics have viewed the medical industry's abandonment of it as part of a Big Pharma conspiracy against the cheap, generic drug. Some patients in his care have what he calls “turbo cancer,” Makis says, blaming suspected adulterants in the mRNA vaccines that he says have killed millions of people.
For Makis, it's all one big conspiracy – the virus, the vaccine and the suppression of his therapy.
Brianna Ladapo has her own perspective on medicine based on the idea of good and bad spiritual energy. In her memoir, she wrote that as the pandemic began, she intuited that “sinister forces” were planning to “scare the masses into surrendering their sovereignty to a small group of tyrannical elites.” She wrote that the government hides the risks of vaccination.
She sees “dark forces” everywhere, including, she says, in a podcast interview earlier this year in “chemtrails” shaped like a pentagram. “They've been hanging it in the sky for the last few weeks right outside our house,” Ladapo said. The chemical traces “they're dropping on us,” she said, made her and her three sons sick. “The dark side is not our fans.”
(“Chemtrails” are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists, who say they believe contrails, the condensation that forms around the exhaust fumes of commercial aircraft, contain toxic substances that poison people and the area. Although there is no evidence of this, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to study whether they are part of a secret attempt to use toxic chemicals to change the weather.)
Ladapo's husband has not publicly supported all of her beliefs, but as surgeon general, he is overturning decades of accepted public health practice in Florida and pursuing untested treatments. “We are done with fear,” Joseph Ladapo said after being named surgeon general in 2021. He wants to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida and on Sept. 3 announced plans to end the state's childhood vaccination mandate.
A few days after the event in Venice Ladapo said he hopes support Makis' work (even though his treatments are untested and potentially dangerous) through a new $60 million cancer research fund created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey.
Vic Mellor, General Manager local concrete businessfounded and owns We the People. He is an associate of retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who briefly served as President Donald Trump's national security adviser in 2017 before being fired for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn has since become a leader of the Christian nationalist movement.
We, the people, inoculate with vitamins, but do not vaccinate. In fact, many of his proposals are treatments for supposed vaccine damage. The “We the People” portion of the building is a radio studio where conservatives pontificate about what they see as the meanness of liberals and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot—he said he “just knocked on the front doors,” according to a Facebook post described by from Washington Post. He returned home and began building a 10-acre complex that hosts weddings and right-wing meetings, with playgrounds, a butterfly garden, a zip line over a pond frequented by alligators, and an attached, separately owned shooting range.
Visitors who drive along the dirt road to the Hollow, named for the hollow concrete that made Mellor rich, can enter the complex through a dark, cavernous passage lined with neon signs highlighting sayings of men such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Flynn.
The Hollow hosted clinics and events for unvaccinated children. for Ladapoanti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny (who told lawmakers in 2021 hearing in the Ohio House of Representatives this Covid vaccine has made people attractive) and other supporters of “medical freedom”. Mellor created a medical home for such ideas. opening We the people in 2023.
A year earlier, three “medical freedom” candidates won seats on the board that oversees Sarasota Public Hospital and the health care system, following protests over the hospital’s refusal to treat Covid patients with ivermectin and other drugs favored by Covid deniers.
On a recent afternoon at The Hollow, manager Dan Welch was clearing brush when he was approached by KFF Health News. An anti-vaxxer, he welcomed Ladapo's decision to lift the vaccination mandate. “Vaccines were probably originally designed to prevent what they were designed to prevent,” Welch said. “But now there's a lot more metals, aluminum, mercury. Since they started vaccinating, autism rates have gone through the roof, and I believe these vaccines are part of that.”
The theory that vaccines cause autism has been debunked, and manufacturers removed mercury from children's vaccines 24 years ago, although Welch said he doesn't believe it.
Vaccination efforts face additional challenges in Sarasota County's century-old neighborhood of low-rise bungalows called Pinecraft, home to about 3,000 Mennonites — a number that doubles when the Amish snowbirds arrive in the winter. Pastor Timothy Miller said that while Sarasota Mennonites are less culturally isolated than the Mennonite community in West Texas, which experienced a measles outbreak in January, many in his community are also avoiding vaccinations.
His cousin Christy Miller, 26, won't vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any of the other children she hopes to have, she said, because she believes vaccines likely cause autism and other harmful effects.
As for vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, she is not concerned about them. Like Ladapos“I don't live in fear,” she said. “I have a God who is greater than anything else.”
