In The Hollow, 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 a crowd of several hundred gathered on a humid October night to honor state Surgeon General Joseph Ladabo, his wife and an unlicensed Canadian radiologist who treats cancer with horse paste.

event, Titled “The Big Three: Courage, Control, and Cancer.”“, Sponsored We are the center of people’s health and wellnessa clinic funded by the January 6 March, where patients can enjoy red light, sit in ozone-filled saunas, or treat their children for autism using experimental blood concentrating.

In Venice, in Sarasota County, the “Medical Freedom” movement formed to oppose coronavirus lockdowns is mixing health advocates, vaccine haters, right-wing Republicans and angry parents into a mix of anti-government authoritarianism and mystical belief.

Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, a self-proclaimed “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 by William Mackes, Covid conspirator litigator Who, after losing his medical license in 2019, made a living treating cancer patients with anti-parasitic drugs including ivermectin, which has also been supported in some circles as a treatment for Covid during the pandemic.

Clinical trials showed that ivermectin did not work, but coronavirus skeptics viewed the drug’s rejection of it as part of a conspiracy by Big Pharma against a cheap, off-patent drug. Macies says some of the patients in his care have what he calls “turbo-cancer,” blaming alleged impurities in mRNA vaccines that he says have killed millions of people.

For Macies, it’s all a big conspiracy: the virus, the vaccine, and the suppression of its treatments.

Brianna Ladapo has her own view on medicine, based on the idea of ​​good and bad spiritual energy. She wrote in her memoir that when the pandemic began, she realized it had been planned by “sinister forces” to “scare the masses into handing over their sovereignty to a small group of tyrannical elites.” I wrote that the government Hides the risks of vaccination.

She said she sees “dark forces” everywhere, including… In a podcast interview Earlier this year, in “Chemical Pathways” in the shape of a pentagram. “They’ve been sticking it in the sky right outside our house for the past few weeks,” Ladapo said. She said the chemtrail trucks “they throw at us” have made her and her three sons sick. “The dark side isn’t a fan of us.”

(“Chemistry trails” are a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists who say they believe jets, the condensation that forms around commercial aircraft exhaust, contain toxins that poison people and terrain. Although there is no evidence of this, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Plan to look into it Whether they are part of a secret effort to use toxic chemicals to change the weather.)

Ladabo’s husband has not publicly endorsed all of her beliefs, but as surgeon general he is reversing decades of accepted public health practices in Florida and embracing untested treatments. “We are done with fear,” Joseph Ladapo said after his appointment as surgeon general in 2021. He wants to ban mRNA vaccines in Florida, and on September 3 announced plans to end the state’s childhood vaccination mandates.

A few days after the Venice event, Ladapo He said he hoped To support Macis’ work — even though his treatments are unproven and potentially dangerous — through a new $60 million cancer research fund established by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey.

Vic Mellor, CEO Local concrete worksfounded and owned by We the People. He is an aide to retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, who was briefly President Donald Trump’s national security adviser in 2017 before he was 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 offer vitamin shots but no vaccines. In fact, many of her offerings are treatments for supposed vaccine injuries. Part of the We the People building is a broadcast studio, where conservatives talk about what they see as the villainy of liberals and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 — and said he “just knocked on the front doors,” according to a Facebook post. By The Washington Post. He returned home and began building a 10-acre complex that hosts weddings and right-wing rallies, with playgrounds, a butterfly garden, a zipline over a pond visited by alligators, and a separately owned attached gun range.

Visitors traveling down a dirt road to The Hollow — named after the hollow concrete that made Mellor rich — can enter the complex through a dark, cavernous corridor lined with neon signs illuminating sayings from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Flynn.

The Hollow has hosted clinics and events for unvaccinated children Ladapoanti-vaccine activist Sheri Tenpenny (who told lawmakers in 2021 in Hearing in the Ohio House That the Covid vaccine has made people magnetic), and other “medical freedom” advocates. Mellor created a medical home for such ideas by Opening of We the People In 2023.

The previous year, three Medical Freedom candidates won seats on the board of Sarasota’s public hospital and health care system, after protests over the hospital’s refusal to treat Covid patients with ivermectin and other preferred drugs for Covid patients.

On a recent afternoon at The Hollow, manager Dan Welsh was clearing brush when KFF Health News called him. As a foe of vaccinations, he welcomed Ladapo’s move to end vaccine mandates. “Vaccines may have been created early on to prevent what they were supposed to prevent,” Welch said. “But now there are a lot of metals, aluminum and mercury. Since they started vaccinating, the autism rate has gone through the roof, and I think these vaccines are part of that.”

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

Vaccination faces additional challenges in the century-old Sarasota County neighborhood of low-slung cottages called Pencraft, home to about 3,000 Mennonites — a number that doubles when Amish snowbirds arrive in winter. While Mennonites in Sarasota are less culturally isolated than the Mennonite community in West Texas, the site of a January measles outbreak, many in his community are also avoiding vaccination, Pastor Timothy Miller said.

His cousin, Christy Miller, 26, said she will not vaccinate her 9-month-old daughter or any of the other children she hopes to have, because she believes vaccines may cause autism and other harm.

As for vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, she does not worry about them. Like ladabus“I don’t live in fear,” she said. “””””””””””””””””””””””””