Surgeon general Joseph Ladapo retreats on his plans after the US president says: ‘You have vaccines that work’
It took barely two days, and some huffs of disapproval from the White House, before Joseph Ladapo’s bold plan to eliminate all vaccine mandates in Florida began to deflate.
The action, the fervently religious state surgeon general had asserted at a fire and brimstone press conference in Tampa, came straight from the heavens: “Who am I, as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?” he opined, framing the freedom to reject vaccines as a “reflection of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression”.
Mandates were akin to “slavery”, he said, in comments presumably intended to align with the ongoing anti-vaccination campaign of misinformation and myth of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy.
This guy is also enslaved by his wife, who is a psychopathic witch-doctor who claims that angels and beings speak to her, and she “vets” everyone her husband works with. Also chemtrails, paranoia, voices, levitation, etc.
Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife
The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.
In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.
Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”
In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.
She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”
In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”
She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”
She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”
Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.
In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.
Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.
In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”
She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.
In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.
In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.
“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.
“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.
Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.
She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.
“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.
She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.
“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.
Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.
Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.
“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.
She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”
She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.
“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.”
These are the people the MAGA believes should be guiding our health care. You know you are truly crazy when you make RFK Jr almost sound reasonable.
Trump is such a fucktard… But he actually did something correct this time.
Ten bucks says because the AG is black, despite being a MAGA whacko.
Trump did something that isn’t terrible? Wow.
Trump is reportedly planning to put an end to all those prescription drug ads on TV, basically reinstating a ban that was rescinded in the 1990’s. I could get behind that.
That would be sweet, I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m assuming big pharma would just bribe him, as is tradition.
Me, too. They are literally about 25% of the ads I see, and they run them during on most expensive channels during the most expensive time segments. They must be adding sognificant marketing costs to the prices of drugs.
Only 2 countries allow prescription pharma advertising - America and New Zealand.
It’s funny how pathetic they are.
This isn’t pathetic this is weapons grade stupidity.
It’s pathetic that they’d use grand gestures like “who am I, a man, to tell you what to do, when only god rules over all”, but then immediately caving as soon as their god-emperor Trump disapproves.
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Because obviously the lying insurrectionist rapist baboon is above their god, by their reckoning.
Fascists are absolutely correct on one thing, good times really does create weak men, and bad times really does create strong men.
Too bad they get confused of who are strong.
Trump says “Crawl”, they say “How low?”
So… Is the orange baboon pro, or anti vaccine now?
He’s pro whatever gets him more votes, and people are still mostly pro vaccine
It depends
On monetary contributions
Seems to be a clear case of: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The rest of that quote is: “but you still never use it to tell time”
