Running File · Florida
From a summer 2020 event with America’s Frontline Doctors to a 2026 hearing on dropping four school vaccine requirements: a dated record of what Florida’s top public health official has said and done, each entry tied to its source.
This file is built the way our RFK Jr. running file is: dated entries, linked sources, no adjectives the record does not support. Where accounts of an event differ, the page says so. Where a claim about him circulates but could not be confirmed, it is left out.
Spring 2020
Then a physician-researcher at UCLA, Ladapo wrote a series of opinion pieces for the Wall Street Journal and USA Today questioning lockdowns and other COVID-19 measures. According to Mother Jones’s account, drawn largely from his wife’s memoir, Brianna Ladapo edited them, and old friends and colleagues reacted badly.
Source: Mother Jones, October 2025.
July 2020 · Washington, D.C.
America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) staged what it called a “White Coat Summit” in Washington, including the 27 July press conference on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. Its video of that press conference, with Simone Gold and Stella Immanuel promoting hydroxychloroquine, went viral before platforms removed it.
He was on the steps. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s reporting through the USA TODAY Network – Florida described Gold, Ladapo and other doctors appearing in lab coats on the Supreme Court steps at an event sponsored by Tea Party Patriots, and reported that Gold had introduced Ladapo as a friend at other events. At his 2022 confirmation hearing, questioned by Senator Polsky about the group, he at first tried to distance himself, then conceded that its members were friends and colleagues. The same reporting noted that he signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
Other outlets add detail. Salon reported that he spoke at the Supreme Court steps press conference wearing a lab coat bearing the group’s logo, promoted hydroxychloroquine, and discussed the “unintended consequences” of COVID-19 measures. Slate published a screenshot from a Tea Party Patriots Facebook Live broadcast captioned as Ladapo at the July 2020 AFLDS event in Washington. It reported that he called Gold an ally in efforts to bring light into “a place where there was mostly darkness and fear and panic,” criticized lockdowns, and questioned cloth masks. Snopes, writing three days after the press conference, identified him in the video as a UCLA physician and clinical researcher, noted that his California licence was current, and reported that he said he was speaking for himself. Snopes also reported that the event appeared to be backed by Tea Party Patriots Action. PolitiFact’s profile of the doctors in the video focused on Immanuel, Gold and Dan Erickson.
The connection did not end with the event. In his 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, Ladapo devoted an entire chapter to his friendship with Simone Gold, according to Politico.
What is not on the record: Slate found no public evidence that Ladapo was involved in AFLDS’s later lawsuit or its ivermectin telehealth operation.
Sources: Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 26 September 2021 (pp. 1A, 14A) and 10 February 2022 (p. 8A); Snopes, 30 July 2020; Salon, 22 September 2021; Slate, September 2021 (includes the screenshot, credited to Tea Party Patriots/Facebook); PolitiFact, 29 July 2020; Mother Jones, October 2025.
August 2020
About a month after the AFLDS press conference, Mother Jones reports, Ladapo was invited by Dr. Scott Atlas to a White House meeting with President Trump. Mother Jones presents this as a separate event, not an AFLDS one.
Source: Mother Jones, October 2025.
Spring 2021 · still at UCLA
On 4 March 2021, JAMA published a randomized trial from Cali, Colombia (López-Medina et al.). Among 400 adults with mild COVID-19, ivermectin did not significantly shorten the time to symptom resolution. An open letter titled “Open Letter by U.S. Doctors: JAMA Ivermectin Study Is Fatally Flawed” answered it at jamaletter.com. The letter argued that the data did not support the authors’ conclusion, and it attacked what it called a “fixation on randomized controlled trials.” It urged that physicians be free to rely on clinical experience and observational studies.
“Joseph A. Ladapo MD PhD, Los Angeles, CA” is on the signature list, six months before his appointment in Florida. The Blaze reported 120 signatures by 16 April 2021, and the list now carries 174 names. The site gives no date for each signature, so exactly when he signed is not on the record.
His co-signers include Pierre Kory and Paul Marik, the leading ivermectin promoters of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, as well as Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, Richard Urso, Meryl Nass and Ryan Cole. Also on the list is Margaret Aranda, whose Substack The Rebel Patient celebrated William Makis’s Florida licence in February 2026.
The larger trials that followed found no benefit either: TOGETHER (New England Journal of Medicine, 2022) and ACTIV-6 (JAMA, 2022 and 2023).
Sources: jamaletter.com, signature list as captured 18 October 2026 (PDF copy); López-Medina et al., JAMA, 4 March 2021; Daniel Horowitz, The Blaze, 16 April 2021 (opinion).
21 September 2021
Governor Ron DeSantis announced the appointment at a morning press conference. Asked about his views, Ladapo said it was “not good for Americans to be hearing just one perspective on this.” At UCLA, the Herald-Tribune reported, his views had been contentious enough that he prefaced interviews and talks with a disclaimer that they were his own and not his employer’s.
His first act, on his second day, was an order leaving masks in schools to parents and letting students exposed to COVID-19 stay in class, stripping districts of the power to quarantine them.
Sources: Salon, 22 September 2021; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 26 September 2021, pp. 1A, 14A.
September 2021
Emails obtained by the Gainesville Sun showed the University of Florida College of Medicine fast-tracked his hiring, knowing the governor wanted him as surgeon general, and timed it to coincide with the announcement. The chair of UF’s board of trustees, Mori Hosseini, described in the reporting as a major GOP fundraiser and DeSantis supporter, was among those looped in and supportive. The courtship took two weeks. His offer letter set a salary of $337,000, which included $75,000 to run a program in the office of UF’s senior vice president for health affairs. That was more than the $262,000 UF Health communications staff had first given reporters. The UF salary supplemented his pay from the Department of Health.
Sources: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (USA TODAY Network – Florida), 29 October 2021, p. 2A; 26 January 2022, p. 3A.
October 2021
Meeting State Senator Tina Polsky in her Capitol office about his confirmation, Ladapo declined to wear a mask after she told him she was being treated for breast cancer, which could weaken her immune system. She asked him to leave. In a written statement he said talking with a mask on was not productive for him, that he had offered to meet outdoors or sit in the hallway, and that he had not meant to be disrespectful.
The Republican Senate President, Wilton Simpson, later wrote in a memo to senators that refusing her request was unprofessional, without naming Ladapo.
Sources: Florida Phoenix, 26 October 2021; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 26 January 2022, p. 3A.
October – November 2021
A Delray Beach physician, Dr. Howard Goldman, filed a complaint on 29 October alleging that Ladapo was knowingly spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines and unproven treatments. Physician complaints in Florida are handled by the Department of Health, the agency Ladapo heads. In a letter dated 22 November, a department investigation manager told Goldman it could take no further action because no law or rule had been violated. Goldman said he had asked for a censure for spreading misinformation, not an arrest. The governor’s press secretary called the complaint politically motivated.
Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (USA TODAY Network – Florida), 14 December 2021, p. 2B.
January – February 2022
Senate Democrats walked out of his first confirmation hearing, before the Health Policy Committee on 26 January, over what they called rambling, non-direct answers. At the second, before the Ethics and Elections Committee in February, the AFLDS exchange took place. The Senate then confirmed him on a party-line vote, 24–15. Months earlier, hundreds of physicians had called for closer scrutiny of the nomination.
Sources: Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 26 January, 10 February and 25 February 2022; Orlando Weekly, 24 February 2022 (gives the vote as 23 February); WUSF, 13 October 2021.
22 July 2022
Five months after Ladapo’s confirmation, his Department of Health issued a medical licence to AFLDS founder Simone Gold. She had already pleaded guilty over 6 January and had been sentenced to 60 days. According to the transcript of her sentencing hearing, the department issued the licence after reviewing the records of her federal case. She began her sentence at a Miami detention centre on 26 July, had moved to Naples, and had set up an online practice. California was then seeking to revoke her licence there. The department did not respond to requests for comment. WUSF’s report notes that Ladapo appeared with Gold at the 2020 press conference.
MedPage Today later reported that Gold holds her Florida licence from the Florida Board of Medicine, which sits within the department.
Sources: WUSF, 18 August 2022; MedPage Today, 5 February 2024. Licensing decisions are made through the department’s boards; nothing in the record shows Ladapo personally involved in this one.
March – summer 2022
In March 2022 Ladapo advised against COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children aged 5 to 17, and in June for children under 5, saying the risks outweighed the benefits. That summer Florida was the only state that did not let pediatricians preorder COVID-19 vaccines for the youngest children.
Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (USA TODAY Network – Florida), 7 November 2022, p. 2C.
October 2022 · reported April 2023
The Department of Health released an analysis, and Ladapo advised men aged 18 to 39 against the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, citing cardiac deaths. In April 2023 the Tampa Bay Times, using early drafts obtained through a records request, reported that earlier versions had shown COVID-19 infection itself could raise the risk of cardiac-related death far more than vaccination. That finding was absent from the final version. Ladapo maintained that the cardiac risk to the group outweighed the benefit.
Two weeks later Politico obtained the draft itself, a Department of Health document titled “Dr. L’s Edits.” It showed that Ladapo personally rewrote the eight-page study. The earlier draft said there was no significant risk to young men; his edits replaced that with language saying mRNA vaccination may be driving an increased risk of cardiac death in men aged 18 to 39. Researchers who reviewed the edits were sharply critical. Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins, said Ladapo had removed material that did not support his position. A University of Florida biostatistician said the edits showed a political motivation behind the final analysis.
Ladapo told Politico that revisions are a normal part of assessing surveillance data, that he has the expertise to make them, and that the public had received biased data on mRNA vaccines from the start. An anonymous internal complaint accusing him of scientific fraud over the study was investigated by the department’s inspector general. The inquiry stopped when the complainant stopped responding to emails. Ladapo called the accusation factually false.
Sources: Associated Press, republishing Tampa Bay Times reporting, 8 April 2023; Politico, “Florida surgeon general altered key findings in study on Covid-19 vaccine safety,” 24 April 2023.
October – November 2022
Ladapo appeared on the podcast of Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an Ohio physician known for the false claim that vaccines cause autism, who was then facing a possible licence revocation by the State Medical Board of Ohio. She repeated that claim and others; he did not correct her. He said the risks of the mRNA vaccines outweighed the benefits for most people, and said of his fellow physicians that he did not have faith that most of them “can be rehabilitated.”
Tenpenny compared today’s doctors with physicians in Nazi Germany, citing the foreword to Ladapo’s own book, which was written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When she said she knew many people calling for a “Nuremberg 2.0” and could not say she disagreed, the Herald-Tribune reported that Ladapo laughed and told her he heard her. Johns Hopkins vaccine-safety director Daniel Salmon, who said he lost family in the concentration camps, called the comparison offensive. Late in October Ladapo had also appeared on X22 Report, a far-right podcast.
Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Tallahassee Democrat / USA TODAY Network – Florida), 7 November 2022, p. 2C. On how Holocaust comparisons travelled through the Canadian movement, see Yellow Stars on Wellington Street.
December 2023 – January 2024
In a 6 December letter to the FDA, Ladapo raised concerns about residual DNA in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and its possible integration into human cells. The FDA replied on 14 December that a review of manufacturing left it confident in the vaccines’ quality and safety, and that no safety concerns related to residual DNA had been identified across more than a billion doses. Its biologics director called nuclear integration implausible. In early January Ladapo called for a halt to the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The FDA called his claims misleading.
Source: WUSF Health News Florida, January 2024.
February 2024 · Weston, Broward County
With six measles cases at Manatee Bay Elementary, Ladapo wrote to parents that the Department of Health was “deferring to parents or guardians” on school attendance. CDC guidance is that unvaccinated students stay home for 21 days after exposure. His letter permitted parents to send unvaccinated children to school.
Source: WLRN, 23 February 2024.
3 September 2025 · Valrico
Speaking at a Christian school alongside the governor, Ladapo said the state would “end all vaccine mandates in Florida,” and that every one of them “drips with disdain and slavery.” The department would remove the requirements set by rule; for those in statute, he asked the legislature to act.
Source: WUWF, 3 September 2025.
October 2025
Mother Jones published a long account of the couple’s turn toward mysticism, drawn largely from Brianna Ladapo’s memoir, including a healer’s week-long treatment of her husband.
Source: Mother Jones, October 2025.
October 2025 · Venice, Sarasota County
A Venice event called “The 3 Big C’s: Courage, Censorship & Cancer” honoured Joseph and Brianna Ladapo, along with William Makis, the keynote speaker. Several hundred people attended at the Venice Community Center. The sponsor was We the People Health and Wellness Center, a clinic founded and owned by Vic Mellor, who also built “The Hollow,” a nearby venue for right-wing and “medical freedom” gatherings. Brianna Ladapo chaired a panel.
KFF describes the clinic as offering red-light therapy, ozone steam baths, vitamin shots and treatments for supposed vaccine injuries, but no vaccines, as well as treatment of children for autism with an experimental blood concentrate. Part of the building is a broadcasting studio. Mellor was at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021; a Facebook post described by the Washington Post has him saying he only knocked on front doors. On his return he began building The Hollow, which KFF says has hosted clinics for unvaccinated children and events for Ladapo and Sherri Tenpenny.
The clinic’s history. The building came first. In March 2023, Herald-Tribune columnist Chris Anderson reported that a company run by Mellor had bought 959 E. Venice Ave. for $2.75 million to house the clinic. The seller was Black Manatee Investments, a company run by Patrick Byrne. Byrne, the former Overstock.com chief executive, had spent millions trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen. In December 2020 he was among the people who got into the White House and urged President Trump to use the National Guard to seize voting machines. Anderson described Byrne as close to Flynn, with Mellor part of the same circle. A rally at the building that month drew people angry that Sarasota Memorial had not offered alternative COVID-19 therapies. We The People opened there in September 2023 on a monthly subscription model that bypasses insurance. Mellor told the Daily Beast, “You can’t work here unless you’ve been fired by the establishment for believing in your patients first.” Tampa Bay 28 reported in December 2023 that the clinic prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 and offered no vaccines. Its pediatrician then was Renata Moon, whose Washington State University contract had not been renewed after she publicly questioned COVID vaccines, and who was under investigation by the Washington Medical Commission. Co-owner Tanya Parus, local president of Moms for America, had organized mask-exemption waivers during the pandemic. In 2024, as the clinic’s president and managing member, she ran for the Sarasota County Public Hospital Board. She argued that Sarasota Memorial’s website should carry the Surgeon General’s warnings about COVID vaccines, that is, Ladapo’s.
In November 2024 the clinic sued Parus in federal court, calling her a former minority member. It alleged that she took patients’ confidential medical records and trade secrets to start a competing company. On 2 December 2024 the court refused to issue an emergency order without notice to her, finding the clinic’s claims undocumented on key points, and ordered both sides to preserve evidence. These are allegations, and the outcome has not been found.
Closer to home for anyone who has practised there: in 2022, KFF reports, three “medical freedom” candidates won seats on the board that oversees Sarasota Memorial Hospital, after protests over the hospital’s refusal to treat COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and similar drugs.
A few days later, according to KFF Health News, Ladapo said in a Facebook video that he hoped to support Makis’s work through the new $60 million cancer research fund created by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Casey DeSantis. KFF called Makis’s antiparasitic cancer treatments, including ivermectin, “unproven and potentially dangerous.” KFF reported Ladapo’s remark secondhand and did not quote him directly.
The state announced a new $60 million round of the Florida Cancer Innovation Fund on 24 September 2025. An unbylined October 2026 report says its priorities include repurposed generic drugs such as ivermectin. We have not confirmed that wording in the state’s release, and no grant to Makis is on the record.
The venue’s background. The Hollow has a political history that predates the Ladapos. In 2022 the Associated Press and PBS Frontline described the 10-acre Venice site, owned by Victor Mellor Sr., as the base for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s push into Sarasota County politics, especially school-board races. Proud Boys members were active in that campaign. At one Hollow event, doctors handed out mask and vaccine waivers for schoolchildren. Mellor told AP the site was “absolutely the opposite spectrum” of a militia camp.
Mellor also founded and owns the We The People clinic. As of October 2026, the clinic’s website lists Brianna Ladapo among its practitioners as an “Integrative Health Coach,” in an educational and supportive role only. It does not list Makis and says nothing about cancer or ivermectin.
Sources: Arthur Allen, KFF Health News, 31 October 2025, republished by WUSF and News-Medical. The Hollow: Michelle R. Smith, Associated Press/PBS Frontline, 18 October 2022. Clinic staff: wtphealthcare.com, viewed 18 October 2026. Clinic history: Chris Anderson, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 26 March 2023, pp. 1C and 6C (column); Decca Muldowney, Daily Beast, 28 October 2023; Katie LaGrone, Tampa Bay 28 (WFTS), 7 December 2023; Your Observer, 19 July 2024; We The People Health and Wellness Center LLC v. Parus, No. 8:24-cv-2774 (M.D. Fla.), order of 2 December 2024. Cancer fund: planet-today.com, 7 October 2026 (unbylined), citing a flgov.com release of 24 September 2025.
2026 legislative sessions
Despite the governor’s and Ladapo’s request, no legislator filed a bill to remove the statutory requirements in any 2026 session, as CBS News reported. That left only the vaccines the department controls by rule.
Source: The Defender (Children’s Health Defense), citing CBS News, October 2026.
5 March 2026
In a MedPage Today opinion piece on professional accountability for medical misinformation, an epidemiologist and an immunology professor listed the University of Florida’s failure to reprimand Ladapo, whom they accused of distorting data and using anti-vaccine rhetoric, among institutions that stayed silent. They also noted that Simone Gold had not had her medical licence revoked.
Source: Katie Suleta and Aimee Pugh Bernard, “Neutrality Is Dangerous in the Face of Medical Misinformation,” MedPage Today, 5 March 2026 (opinion).
August 2026
Viliam (William) Makis, found in civil contempt and permanently enjoined by an Alberta court, appeared on Florida’s physician register in August 2026 as licence ME183817, Venice. Physician licensing in Florida is decided by the Board of Medicine, which sits within the Department of Health that Ladapo heads. The licensing decision was the Board’s, not his personally. Full record.
The earlier paper trail. Alberta’s Court of King’s Bench describes a Board of Medicine “Notice of Intent to Approve Licensure With Conditions,” dated 12 February 2026. The condition was that he obtain a U.S. Social Security number, and the court noted that as of that date he had not yet met it. Makis told the court he had been licensed as of 6 February 2026, a claim the court treated as loose. The court said it took no issue with the Florida licensure but found him in contempt in Alberta, granted a permanent injunction, and warned that the College could seek an arrest warrant if he did not comply (CPSA v Makis, 2026 ABKB 159, 4 March 2026). An Alberta Court of Appeal ruling followed (2026 ABCA 198). CBC reported that he did not yet appear on Florida’s public licence search as of 25 March 2026.
On 9 February 2026, the Substack The Rebel Patient (Dr. Margaret Aranda), an advocacy source sympathetic to Makis, celebrated a new Florida licence. It gave no date, licence number or other detail.
Venice is where Ladapo was honoured alongside Makis four months before the notice. The record does not show that Ladapo had any part in the Board’s decision.
Sources: CPSA v Makis, 2026 ABKB 159; planet-today.com, 7 October 2026 (unbylined), citing CBC and 2026 ABCA 198; The Rebel Patient, 9 February 2026 (advocacy).
6–8 October 2026 · Lake Mary
The department held a public hearing on removing school and child-care requirements for hepatitis B, varicella, Hib and pneumococcal vaccines. Two days earlier his wife posted a campaign-style poster urging supporters to “fill the room” and stay for pictures with him and his team. At the hearing he said the change was not about the scientific effectiveness of any vaccine. Full story, with the poster.
Ladapo is responsible for his own record, not for what others at the AFLDS event did later. But the two best-known faces of that summer are part of the context, and their records since then are public.
Founder of America’s Frontline Doctors. The day before the Capitol attack she urged a Washington rally not to get vaccinated; on 6 January 2021 she entered the Capitol and gave a speech in the rotunda. She pleaded guilty in March 2022 to a misdemeanour of unlawfully entering and remaining in a restricted area. On 16 June 2022 she was sentenced to 60 days in prison, 12 months’ supervised release and a $9,500 fine. She was pardoned on 20 January 2025.
On 4 November 2022 AFLDS’s own board chair sued her in federal court in Florida. The suit alleged she used the charity’s funds, without board approval, for a $3.6 million home in Naples, three vehicles, household staff and about $50,000 a month on its credit cards. These are allegations in a complaint, not findings.
On 2 February 2024 the Medical Board of California publicly reprimanded her over the 6 January conviction. It ordered ethics and professionalism courses and $26,739 in costs. The administrative law judge rejected the five-year probation the board’s investigators sought, citing her clean record since 1990. She also faced a lawsuit from the parents of a Nevada man who reportedly died after taking hydroxychloroquine prescribed by a physician affiliated with AFLDS; the group denied prescribing it.
Florida: on 22 July 2022, four days before she began her sentence, Florida’s Department of Health issued her a medical licence. She had moved to Naples and set up an online practice. See the timeline.
Sources: ABC News, 16 June 2022; The Intercept, 14 January 2021; WUSF, 18 August 2022; MedPage Today, 7 November 2022 and 5 February 2024; Wikipedia, “Simone Gold.”
The Houston physician whose hydroxychloroquine claims drove the viral video. The Washington Post reported her past statements that demons cause illnesses. On 15 October 2021 the Texas Medical Board took non-disciplinary corrective action. It found she had prescribed hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 without adequately explaining the risks, ordered her to adopt signed informed-consent policies for off-label treatment, and required a $500 payment. Her $100 million defamation suit against CNN was dismissed by a federal court in Houston in August 2022, which found CNN’s reports were not false, were protected opinion or fair comment, or lacked actual malice. A Louisiana family separately sued her and another doctor over the 2019 care of a woman who later died. The suit was unresolved when the Houston Chronicle reported it.
Sources: Washington Post, 28 July 2020; HuffPost and KHOU, 2021; Jackson Walker (CNN’s counsel), August 2022; Houston Chronicle.
Florida is where Ontario snowbirds winter and where a struck-off Alberta physician now holds a licence. Its health department is the first in North America to set out formally to remove childhood vaccine requirements. Nothing here changes Canadian guidance, and NACI sets recommendations independently. But the arguments made in Tallahassee arrive in Canadian school-board meetings within months, and it helps to know their source.