VENICE, Fla. – MAGA and MAHA are happily married in Florida, and nowhere is they more comfortable than Sarasota County. On a humid October night in Sarasota County, hundreds of people gathered to honor state surgeon Joseph Ladapo, his wife and an unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treated cancer with horse paste.
event, Titled “The Three Big Cs: Courage, Censorship, and Cancer.”,” was sponsored by. We are the People Health and Wellness Center.The clinic, funded by January 6 march participants, allows patients to bathe in red lights, sit in ozone-infused steam baths or treat their children’s autism with an experimental blood concentrate.
In Venetian Sarasota County, the ‘medical freedom’ movement against COVID-19 lockdowns has mixed wellness advocates, anti-vaccine opponents, right-wing Republicans and angry parents with anti-government absolutism and mystical beliefs.
Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, a self-described “spiritual healer” who says she speaks with angels and has prophetic visions, chaired a panel at the event held at the Venice Community Center. The keynote address was given by William Makis. COVID-19 conspiracy theorist files lawsuit Since losing his medical license in 2019, he has made a living treating cancer patients using anthelmintics, including ivermectin. The drug has also been advocated as a coronavirus treatment in some circles during the pandemic.
Although clinical trials showed ivermectin to be ineffective, skeptics viewed the drug’s rejection of ivermectin as part of a conspiracy by Big Pharma to pander to cheap, off-patent drugs. Makis says some of the patients he treats suffer from what he calls “turbocancer,” which he claims is caused by adulteration in mRNA vaccines that have killed millions.
For Makis, the virus, the vaccine, and the suppression of the cure are all one big conspiracy.
Brianna Ladapo has her own medical opinion based on the idea of good and bad spiritual energy. In her memoir, she wrote that as the pandemic began, she sensed that “sinister forces” were plotting to “frighten the masses into ceding sovereignty to a small, tyrannical elite.” She wrote that the government: Hiding the risks of vaccination.
She said she sees “dark forces” everywhere, including: In a podcast interview Earlier this year, a pentagon-shaped ‘chemtrail’ was used. “They’ve been painting it in the sky right outside my house for the past few weeks,” Ladapo said. She said the chemtrails “they’re bombarding us with” have made her and her three sons sick. “The dark side is not our fan.”
(“Chemtrails” are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists who believe that contrails, the condensation that forms around commercial airplane exhaust, contain toxins that poison people and the landscape. There is no evidence for this, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to investigate whether it is part of a secret effort to use toxic chemicals to change the weather.)
Ladapo’s husband may not publicly support all of her beliefs, but as a surgeon, he is overturning decades of accepted public health practice in Florida and embracing unproven treatments. “The fear is now over,” Joseph Ladapo said after being appointed surgeon general in 2021. He wants to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida and announced plans Sept. 3 to end childhood vaccination mandates in the state.
A few days after the Venice event, Ladapo he said he hoped A new $60 million cancer research fund created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, will support Makis’ research even though his treatment is unproven and potentially dangerous.
Big Mellor CEO 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 Russians. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn has since become a leader in the Christian nationalist movement.
We the People provides vitamin shots but not vaccines. In fact, many of its products are treatments for presumed vaccine injuries. Part of the We the People building is a broadcast studio, where conservatives argue for what they see as the villains of liberals and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, where he said he “just knocked on the front door,” according to a Facebook post. washington post. He returned home and began building a 10-acre complex where he hosted weddings and right-wing rallies. It includes a playground, a butterfly garden, a zipline over a pond visited by alligators, and a separately owned shooting range.
Visitors who travel down a dirt road to The Hollow, named for the hollow concrete that made Mellor wealthy, enter the building through a dark, cavernous passageway lined with neon signs illuminating aphorisms like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Flynn.
The Hollow hosted clinics and events for unvaccinated children. radapoAnti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny told lawmakers in 2021: Ohio House Hearing That Corona Vaccine Made People Attractive) and other “medical freedom” advocates. Mellor created a medical facility for those ideas. We the People released In 2023.
The previous year, three “medical freedom” candidates won seats on the board that oversees Sarasota’s public hospitals and health care system after protests over hospitals’ refusal to treat COVID patients with ivermectin and other anti-COVID drugs.
On a recent afternoon, KFF Health News approached Director Dan Welch as he was clearing brush at The Hollow. An enemy of vaccinations, he welcomed Ladapo’s move to end vaccine mandates. “Probably initially the vaccine was created to prevent what it was supposed to prevent,” Welch said. “But now there are a lot more things in it: metals, aluminum, mercury, etc. Autism rates have skyrocketed since vaccinations started, and I think this vaccine is part of that.”
The theory that vaccines cause autism has been debunked and manufacturers removed mercury from children’s vaccines 24 years ago, but Welch said he doesn’t believe it.
Vaccinations face additional challenges in a century-old Sarasota County neighborhood where about 3,000 Mennonites live in low-rise bungalows called Pinecraft. When Amish snowbirds arrive in the winter, their numbers double. Pastor Timothy Miller said Mennonites in Sarasota are less culturally isolated than Mennonite communities in West Texas, where a measles outbreak occurred in January, but many in his community also avoid vaccinations.
His cousin, Christy Miller, 26, said she would not vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any other children she would like to have. Because it is thought that vaccines can cause autism and other harms.
I’m not worried about vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. Like Ladaphos“I don’t live in fear,” she said. “I have a God who is greater than all.”
