Struck off in Alberta, licensed in Florida: the Villiam Makis file
In March 2026 an Alberta judge found Villiam Makis in civil contempt and granted a permanent injunction barring him from calling himself a doctor or giving cancer advice. In June he told the Court of Appeal that Albertans were safe because he was moving to Florida. On 7 August 2026 he appeared on Florida's public register of physicians.
What this page claims, and what it does not
Everything in the Alberta section comes from the published decisions of the Court of King's Bench and the Court of Appeal of Alberta and from the public statements of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. Civil contempt is not a criminal conviction. No criminal charge has been laid against Dr. Makis and none is alleged here.
No patient of his is said on this page to have been harmed. No finding has been made that any treatment he recommended injured anyone. What the record establishes is narrower and, for a Canadian reader, more immediately useful: what a regulator and two levels of court found, what he told the court, and where he went next.
Nothing here suggests the Florida Board of Medicine acted improperly. The question this page raises about Florida is a different one — what the Board knew, and what a licence means when it is granted to someone a Canadian court has enjoined.
The Alberta sequence, in order
The argument he made, and what happened to it
The part of the Court of Appeal record worth dwelling on is not the law. It is what he offered the court as reassurance.
Asked why the Alberta order should be stayed, he submitted that he had moved his primary residence to Florida for legitimate professional reasons, that his wife held a power of attorney to sell the Edmonton house, and that any risk to the Alberta public was therefore effectively moot — because he had conditional approval to practise medicine in Florida.
Read that argument twice
The submission is that Albertans need not be protected from him because another jurisdiction has agreed to license him. It treats a licence as a destination rather than a standard. The Court of Appeal was unimpressed, but it refused permission to appeal on conventional grounds — no arguable question, no prospect of success — rather than on the merits of that reasoning.
Seven weeks later the conditional approval became licence ME183817. The argument, in other words, worked out exactly as he said it would. Not in the Alberta courtroom, where it failed. In Florida, where it was never tested.
Venice, October 2025: who spoke, and who paid for the room
The event was called The 3 Big C's: Courage, Censorship & Cancer. It was held at the Venice Community Center in Sarasota County, Florida, and drew a crowd reported at several hundred. It was sponsored by the We The People Health and Wellness Center. Makis gave the keynote.
It honoured Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida. A panel at the event was chaired by Brianna Ladapo, his wife, who is described in KFF Health News reporting as a self-proclaimed spiritual healer who says she speaks with angels.
One correction to a detail that circulates online, including in material we were sent: Brianna Ladapo does not run the clinic. The centre was founded and is owned by Vic Mellor, the chief executive of a local concrete business, whom KFF describes as having marched on 6 January. On the clinic's own team page Brianna Ladapo is listed as an Integrative Health Coach, alongside a physician and a nurse practitioner. The site's own disclaimer states that she does not diagnose, prescribe, treat, interpret testing or direct medication changes. Getting this right is not a favour to anyone. It is the difference between a claim that survives contact with a lawyer and one that does not.
The clinic, and who vouches for it
We The People Health and Wellness Center opened on 7 September 2023 at 959 E. Venice Avenue in Venice, Florida, on a subscription membership model. Its published menu of services includes red light therapy, ozone therapy, peptide therapy, NAD+ infusion, hyperbaric oxygen, EBOO, PRP, medical weight loss, IV therapy and vitamin shots. It offers no vaccines. KFF Health News reported that children have been treated there for autism with an experimental blood concentrate. The premises include a broadcasting studio.
The endorsements are not an allegation by us. They are on the clinic's own homepage, which invites visitors to watch Dr. Sherri Tenpenny and Dr. Pierre Kory give what the site itself calls their full endorsement.
| Endorser | What happened to their own credentials | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| Sherri Tenpenny, DO | Her Ohio osteopathic medical licence was suspended by the State Medical Board of Ohio in 2023 for failing to cooperate with an investigation. She is best known publicly for 2021 testimony to the Ohio House suggesting COVID-19 vaccines could make people magnetic. | A clinic that advertises her approval is telling you what it considers an authority. |
| Pierre Kory, MD | His certification by the American Board of Internal Medicine in critical care medicine and pulmonary disease was revoked in 2023 over COVID-19 misinformation. He retains a licence to practise. | Board certification is the specialty profession's own judgment of competence. Losing it is not a licensing matter; it is the field itself withdrawing. |
| Villiam Makis, MD | Permanent injunction and civil contempt finding in Alberta, March 2026; permission to appeal refused, June 2026. Licensed in Florida, August 2026. | The keynote speaker. The one of the three currently holding an unrestricted licence anywhere. |
The sixty million dollars
This is the part that moves the story out of the realm of a badly-run clinic and into public policy.
On 24 September 2025 the Governor of Florida and the First Lady announced a $60 million funding opportunity under the Florida Cancer Innovation Fund, established through the Casey DeSantis Cancer Research Program under s. 381.915 of the Florida Statutes and administered by the Florida Department of Health. The state's own announcement lists among its priorities nutrition-focused projects, including the repurposing of generic drugs — and names ivermectin as an example.
A few days after the Venice event, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said in a video posted to social media that he hoped to support Makis's work through that fund. He heads the department that administers it.
What is actually being proposed
Makis treats cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs — ivermectin, fenbendazole, mebendazole — and promotes the claim that a wave of aggressive “turbo cancers” has been caused by impurities in mRNA vaccines. That claim has no support in the oncology literature. Neither ivermectin nor fenbendazole has been shown in any adequate human trial to treat cancer.
At the moment the Surgeon General said this, Makis was under an Alberta interim injunction forbidding him to give cancer advice, and was four months from being found in contempt of it.
Why this belongs on a Canadian site
Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.
First, he is ours. He trained and practised in Canada, built his following here during the pandemic, and was enjoined by a Canadian court. Canadian readers who encounter him online are entitled to know what the Court of King's Bench of Alberta found, and that a permanent injunction against him remains in force in this country.
Second, the injunction does not travel. An Alberta order binds conduct in Alberta. It does not stop a Substack, a YouTube channel or a podcast appearance from reaching an Albertan with a new diagnosis at two in the morning. The College has said it continues to monitor compliance. Monitoring is what a regulator can do; it is not the same as the problem being solved.
Third, and this is the reason the page sits beside the RFK Jr. running file rather than in the Bad MD folder: the pattern. A practitioner loses standing in one jurisdiction, relocates to one that has made ideological alignment a licensing-adjacent virtue, and within a year a state health official is proposing public research money for the protocol that cost him his standing in the first place. That is not a story about one Albertan. It is a working model, and there is nothing about it that could not be attempted here.
What a Canadian patient should take from this
A Florida medical licence is a real licence. It is not a rehabilitation. It says that the State of Florida has concluded he meets its requirements to practise there. It does not say that an Alberta court was wrong, that the contempt finding was vacated, or that antiparasitic drugs treat cancer. None of those things happened.
If you or someone you love has a cancer diagnosis and has been pointed toward fenbendazole or ivermectin, the single most useful thing you can do is take the suggestion to your own oncologist and ask them directly. They will not be angry. They have had this conversation before.
A note on the spelling of his name
His name is spelled Villiam. The Alberta regulator's public record and the court citations render it Viliam, with one L, and most American reporting — KFF Health News and CNN among them — uses William. We note all three only so that a reader searching the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta's register, CanLII, or the Florida Department of Health licence verification database finds the record rather than an empty result.
A note on how this page is written
Court findings are reported as court findings and attributed to their citations. First-party material — the clinic's own website, the State of Florida's own press release, his own Substack, the regulator's own statement — is preferred to any secondary account of it, and is identified as first-party where it is used. Where a claim circulating online turned out to be wrong, as with the ownership of the clinic, we have said so in the body rather than quietly dropping it.
Dr. Makis is welcome to respond. Corrections will be posted.
Sources. On the Alberta proceedings: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta v Makis, 2026 ABKB 159 (Mah J., 4 March 2026), as published by the College and by Canadian Lawyer; CPSA v Makis, 2026 ABCA 198 (Feth J.A., 17 June 2026), and Canadian Lawyer's reports of both decisions, 25 June 2026; the earlier appeal decision 2026 ABCA 17; the interim injunction of 15 August 2025; the College's public statements of 24 June 2025 and subsequent updates; and the summary of the contempt and permanent injunction published by Mathews Dinsdale. On Venice and the clinic: Daniel Chang and Sam Whitehead, KFF Health News / WUSF Health News Florida, At The Hollow in Florida, the ‘Medical Freedom’ Movement Finds Its Base Camp, 31 October 2025; the We The People Health and Wellness Center's own website, including its team page and its published endorsements. On the Florida funding: Florida Department of Health press release, 24 September 2025, announcing the $60 million Florida Cancer Innovation Fund opportunity under the Casey DeSantis Cancer Research Program, s. 381.915 Fla. Stat. On the Florida licence: the Florida Department of Health MQA licence verification database, searched 7 August 2026 (licence ME183817). On board certification and licensure of the named endorsers: the American Board of Internal Medicine's published revocation notices and the State Medical Board of Ohio's orders, as reported by Science-Based Medicine and contemporaneous news coverage.
Corrections are welcome and will be posted. QuackeryWatch is a non-commercial consumer information site operated by Terry Polevoy, MD, FRCPC.