At The Hollow in Florida, the ‘Medical Freedom’ Movement Finds Its Base Camp

VENICE, Fla. — 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 people gathered to honor state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, his wife and an unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treats cancer with horse paste.

The event, titled “The 3 Big Cs: Courage, Censorship and Cancer,” was sponsored by the We the People Health and Wellness Center, a clinic funded by a January 6 walker, where patients can lounge in a red light, sit in ozone-infused steam baths or have their children treated for autism with an experimental blood concentrate.

In Venice, Sarasota County, a “medical freedom” movement forged in opposition to covid lockdowns mixes wellness advocates, vaccine haters, right-wing Republicans and angry parents in a stew of anti-government absolutism and mystical belief.

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 at the Venice Community Center. The keynote address was given by William Makis, a Covid litigator who, after losing his medical license in 2019, made his living treating cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs, including ivermectin, which has also been championed in some circles as a treatment for Covid during the pandemic.

Clinical trials showed ivermectin was not effective, but Covid skeptics saw the medicine’s rejection as part of a plot by big pharma against a cheap, off-patent drug. Some of the patients he cares for have what he calls “turbo cancers,” Makis says, blaming suspected impurities in mRNA vaccines that he says have killed millions.

For Makis, it’s all one big conspiracy: the virus, the vaccine and the suppression of its therapies.

Brianna Ladapo has her own vision of medicine, based on the idea of ​​good and bad spiritual energy. She wrote in her memoir that early in the pandemic, she had a hunch that “sinister forces” planned to “scare the masses into surrendering their sovereignty to a small group of tyrannical elites.” She wrote that the government is hiding the risks of vaccination.

She sees “dark forces” everywhere, including, she said in a podcast interview earlier this year, in pentagram-shaped “chemtrails.” “They’ve been plastering it in the sky right in front of our house for the last few weeks,” Ladapo said. The chemtrails “they are dumping on us,” she said, have made her and her three sons sick. “We’re not fans of the dark side.”

(“Chemtrails” are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists who say they believe that contrails, the condensation formed around commercial airplane exhaust, contain toxic substances that poison people and the terrain. Although there is no evidence of this, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to investigate whether they are part of a clandestine effort to use toxic chemicals to modify the weather.)

Ladapo’s husband has not publicly endorsed all of her beliefs, but as surgeon general, he is overturning decades of accepted public health practice in Florida and embracing untested therapies. “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 September 3 he announced plans to end childhood vaccination mandates in the state.

Days after the Venice event, Ladapo said he hoped to support Makis’ work — although his treatments are unproven and potentially dangerous — through a new $60 million cancer research fund created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey.

Vic Mellor, CEO of a local concrete company, founded and owns We the People. He is an associate of retired 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 provide vitamin shots but not vaccines. In fact, many of its offerings are treatments for supposed vaccine injuries. Part of the We the People building is a broadcast studio, where conservatives debate what they see as the wickedness 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 the Washington Post. He returned home and began 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 adjoining, separately owned shooting range.

Visitors who take a dirt road to The Hollow – named for the hollow concrete that made Mellor rich – can enter the compound through a dark, cavernous passageway lined with neon signs illuminating the maxims of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Flynn.

The Hollow has hosted clinics for unvaccinated children and events for Ladapo, anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny (who in 2021 told lawmakers at an Ohio House hearing that the covid vaccine made people magnetic), and other “medical freedom” advocates. Mellor has created a medical home for such ideas by opening We the People in 2023.

The year before, three “medical freedom” candidates won seats on the board overseeing Sarasota’s public hospital and health system, after protests over the hospital’s refusal to treat covid patients with ivermectin and other anti-covid drugs of choice.

On a recent afternoon at The Hollow, manager Dan Welch was clearing brush when he was approached by KFF Health News. As an enemy of vaccination, he welcomed Ladapo’s decision to end vaccination mandates. “Maybe in the beginning, vaccines were created to prevent what they were supposed to prevent,” Welch said. “But now there’s so much more in there, metals, aluminum, mercury. Since they started vaccinating, the autism rate has exploded, and I believe these vaccines are part of that.”

The theory that vaccines cause autism has been disproven and manufacturers removed mercury from childhood vaccines 24 years ago, although Welch said he doesn’t believe it.

Vaccination faces additional challenges in a century-old low-rise bungalow neighborhood in Sarasota County called Pinecraft, home to about 3,000 Mennonites — and double that number when Amish snowbirds arrive in winter. Pastor Timothy Miller said that although Sarasota Mennonites are less culturally isolated than the West Texas Mennonite community, the site of a measles outbreak in January, many members of his community also avoid vaccination.

Her cousin Kristi Miller, 26, won’t vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any of the other children she hopes to have, she said, because she thinks vaccines likely cause autism and other harms.

As for vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles, she doesn’t worry about them. Like the Ladapos, “I don’t live in fear,” she said. “I have a God who is greater than all.”