VENICE, Fla. \u2014 MAGA and MAHA are happily married in Florida, and nowhere more at home than in Sarasota County, where on a humid October night a crowd of several hundred gathered to honor state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, his wife, and an unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treats cancer with horse paste.<\/p>\n
The event, titled \u201cThe 3 Big C\u2019s: Courage, Censorship & Cancer<\/a>,\u201d was sponsored by the We the People Health and Wellness Center<\/a>, a clinic, funded by a Jan. 6 marcher, where patients can bask in red light, sit in ozone-infused steam baths, or get their children treated for autism with an experimental blood concentrate.<\/p>\n In Venice, in Sarasota County, a \u201cmedical freedom\u201d movement forged in opposition to covid lockdowns blends wellness advocates, vaccine-haters, right-wing Republicans, and angry parents in a stew of anti-government absolutism and mystical belief.<\/p>\n Ladapo\u2019s wife, Brianna, a self-proclaimed \u201cspiritual healer\u201d who says she speaks with angels and has prophetic visions, chaired a panel at the event at the Venice Community Center. The keynote speech was by William Makis, a litigious covid conspiracist<\/a> who, after losing his medical license in 2019, has made a living treating cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs including ivermectin, which was also championed in some circles as a covid treatment during the pandemic.<\/p>\n Clinical trials showed that ivermectin didn\u2019t work, but covid skeptics viewed medicine\u2019s rejection of it as part of a conspiracy by Big Pharma against a cheap, off-patent drug. Some of the patients in his care have what he calls \u201cturbo cancers,\u201d Makis says, blaming alleged impurities in mRNA vaccines that he says have killed millions of people.<\/p>\n For Makis, it\u2019s all one big conspiracy \u2014 the virus, the vaccine, and the suppression of his therapies.<\/p>\n Brianna Ladapo has her own take on medicine, based on the idea of good and bad spiritual energy. She wrote in a memoir that as the pandemic began she intuited that it had been planned by \u201csinister forces\u201d to \u201cfrighten the masses to surrender their sovereignty to a small group of tyrannical elites.\u201d She has written that the government hides vaccination\u2019s risks<\/a>.<\/p>\n She sees \u201cdark forces\u201d all over the place, including, she said in a podcast interview<\/a> earlier this year, in \u201cchemtrails\u201d shaped like a pentagram. \u201cThey\u2019ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks,\u201d Ladapo said. The chemtrails \u201cthey are dumping on us,\u201d she said, had sickened her and her three sons. \u201cThe dark side are no fans of ours.\u201d<\/p>\n (\u201cChemtrails\u201d are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists who say they think that contrails, the condensation formed around commercial airplane exhaust, contain toxic substances poisoning people and the terrain. Although there is zero evidence of that, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to look into<\/a> whether they are part of a clandestine effort to use toxic chemicals to change the weather.)<\/p>\n Ladapo\u2019s husband hasn\u2019t publicly endorsed all her beliefs, but as surgeon general he\u2019s reversing decades of accepted public health practice in Florida and embracing untested therapies. \u201cWe\u2019re done with fear,\u201d Joseph Ladapo said after being named surgeon general in 2021. He wants to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida, and on Sept. 3 he announced plans to end childhood vaccination mandates in the state.<\/p>\n A few days after the Venice event, Ladapo said he hoped<\/a> to support Makis\u2019 work \u2014 though his treatments are unproven and potentially dangerous \u2014 through a new $60 million cancer research fund created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey.<\/p>\n Vic Mellor, CEO of a local concrete business<\/a>, founded and owns We the People. He\u2019s an associate of retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was briefly President Donald Trump\u2019s national security adviser in 2017 before being dismissed for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn since has become a leader of the Christian nationalist movement.<\/p>\n We the People provides vitamin shots but no vaccines. In fact, many of its offerings are treatments for supposed vaccine injuries. Part of the We the People building is a broadcasting studio, where conservatives hold forth on what they see as the villainy of liberals and the American Academy of Pediatrics.<\/p>\n Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 \u2014 he said he \u201cjust knocked on front doors,\u201d according to a Facebook post described by The Washington Post<\/a>. He returned home and started building a 10-acre complex that hosts weddings and right-wing assemblies, with playgrounds, a butterfly garden, a zip line over a pond visited by alligators, and an attached, separately owned gun range.<\/p>\n Visitors who travel down a dirt road to The Hollow \u2014 named for the hollow-core concrete that made Mellor wealthy \u2014 can enter the compound through a dark, cavernous passage lined with neon signs illuminating maxims from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Flynn.<\/p>\n The Hollow has hosted clinics for unvaccinated kids and events for Ladapo<\/a>, anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny (who in 2021 told legislators at an Ohio House hearing<\/a> that covid vaccine made people magnetic), and other \u201cmedical freedom\u201d advocates. Mellor created a medical home for such ideas by opening We the People<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n The year before, three \u201cmedical freedom\u201d candidates had won seats on the board overseeing Sarasota\u2019s public hospital and health care system, after protests over the hospital\u2019s refusal to treat covid patients with ivermectin and other drugs of choice for covid contrarians.<\/p>\n On a recent afternoon at The Hollow, manager Dan Welch was clearing brush when approached by KFF Health News. As a foe of vaccinations, he welcomed Ladapo\u2019s move to end vaccine mandates. \u201cMaybe in their inception, vaccines were created to prevent what they were supposed to prevent,\u201d Welch said. \u201cBut now there\u2019s so much more in there, the metals, aluminum, mercury. Since they started vaccination, the autism rate went through the roof, and I believe these vaccines are part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n The theory that vaccines cause autism has been debunked, and manufacturers removed mercury from childhood vaccines 24 years ago, although Welch said he doesn\u2019t believe it.<\/p>\n Vaccination faces additional challenges in a century-old Sarasota County neighborhood of low-slung bungalows called Pinecraft, home to about 3,000 Mennonites \u2014 and double that number when Amish snowbirds arrive in the winter. Pastor Timothy Miller said that while Sarasota\u2019s Mennonites are less culturally isolated than the Mennonite community in West Texas, site of a measles outbreak in January, many in his community also shun vaccination.<\/p>\n His cousin Kristi Miller, 26, won\u2019t vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any of the other children she hopes to have, she said, because she thinks vaccines probably cause autism and other harms.<\/p>\n As for vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, she doesn\u2019t worry about them. Like the Ladapos<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t live in fear,\u201d she said. \u201cI have a God who\u2019s bigger than everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\nUSE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n