One Sunday last month, I came across a clip on social media that I couldn’t stop watching. CNN host Jake Tapper was asking Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, about the decision he announced earlier that week to end all vaccine mandates in the state.
Tapper pointed out that vaccination rates had been declining in Florida, while cases of hepatitis A, whooping cough, and chickenpox were on the rise. So, Tapper asked, did state health officials conduct any analysis to project how many new cases of those diseases would likely arise as a result of ending the mandates?
“Absolutely not,” Ladapo replied. “There’s this conflation of the science and sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do?”
To that, I had one response: Who was this guy?
I teamed up with my colleague Kiera Butler to find out. We started by investigating Ladapo’s path to becoming Florida’s top doctor, which meant spending many hours reading his memoir in the park, on the subway, at the gym. It turns out the guy was basically a normie—and a smart one, at that—before he went down the woo-woo rabbit hole he now seems to inhabit: He graduated from Harvard Medical School and worked at NYU and UCLA before taking the job in Florida.
There are two people we can thank for his descent: His wife, Brianna, a self-described “Energetic Healer,” and an ex–Navy SEAL turned holistic guru named Christopher Maher, who Ladapo has called “a mechanic for the human spirit.” Brianna believes that she once levitated and can communicate with “divine presences,” and that people—including kids—choose their own fate, sometimes even opting for “lives of sacrifice.” Maher believes in spirit animals and treats his clients (including the Ladapos), in part, by walking on the backs of their thighs and shaking their entire bodies. (Maher responded to our questions by directing questions to the Ladapos, who did not reply to repeated requests for comment.)
Neither Brianna nor Maher seems to have any traditional training in Western medicine—yet they do have Ladapo’s ear. Without them, Ladapo said on a podcast earlier this year, “I’d still be version 1.0.” To understand the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of Ladapo’s crusade against evidence-based public health practices, it turns out, you need to understand Brianna and Maher.
I cannot stress enough that this story is, most likely, way weirder than you think. So, please, give it a read.
—Julianne McShane
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