Joseph Ladapo is the surgeon general for the state of Florida and is a vaccine skeptic who recently announced plans to abolish all mandates that requires parents to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis, comparing such mandates to slavery. He also opposes gender-affirming care and counseling for transgender and nonbinary minors. He is a good example of how an education obtained at elite institutions (he obtained his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest and his MD and PhD from Harvard) does not mean that one cannot hold unscientific views. He has been publicly rebuked by the CDC and FDA for spreading scientific misinformation.
But extreme as his views are, they are nowhere close to those of his wife Brianna who is described as an “intuitive spiritual healer, movement therapist, and teacher”.
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.
…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”.
…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.”
…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”.
…“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.
…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.
She claims that her children also have these visions. In one episode of the TV series House the titular character played by Hugh Laurie says, “You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic” which seems to me to cover communications with angels as well.
But wait, there’s more! She is a firm believer that not only are chemtrails real, but that they are deliberately targeting her and her husband.
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.
Actually, there is nothing mysterious about these flights. They should be very easy to track down. Planes that produce contrails are ones that are able to fly at high altitudes and are required to submit flight plans. I have written before about how difficult it would be to sustain a chemtrails conspiracy.
Apart from the fact that she and her husband are a menace to public health, I also wonder what it must be like to live in a world like hers, where you are surrounded by malign shadowy forces that are out to get you. Are you in a state of permanent fear? Or are you reassured by the idea of a horde of angel acting as a personal security detail. Such levels of paranoia must make everyday life quite complicated and even unpleasant, even if feel that you have angels to protect you. Does she have to call on the angels, like with a hot line or do they come on their own? What do her friends and extended family say when she tells them these things? Unless they are also deep into the well of such thinking, do they humor her? Avoid her? Try to change the subject?
And what about the children? I do not know their ages but given that the parents are in their mid-forties, they must be at most teenagers. She claims that the children also have these visions but are they saying it to please their mother by going along with her, which children are wont to do?
I’ve had some ridiculous inconsistencies in some of my dreams as well. Maybe I should get into woowoo. Or maybe not.
There’s a similar but not as extreme paranoia with the readers of some papers in the UK.
My in-laws are dyed in the wool Daily Mail readers and their lives are driven by fear. Despite living just 40 or so miles out of London, they just *know* that they can’t visit it for fear of being murdered.
It must be utterly miserable; they are.
I try always to think the best of people, I really do. On that basis when I encounter someone like this woman, I assume that what it’s like to live in a world like hers is relatively pleasant, given that she can’t possibly actually believe the tsunami of obvious, easily-disproven bullshit she spouts. It’s all part of some grift or other, and she’s presumably coining it in by some means as long as she keeps it up. I have contempt for her, of course, for her dishonesty, but giving her the benefit of the doubt I try to give her credit and assume that all of what she says is for show and for the clicks/money/whatever.
It would be horrible, I think, to take her at her word, because you’d be insulting her intellect to a level barely credible. So the answer to the question of whether she lives in a state of fear must surely be “no”, since doing so would require her to be the mental equal of a canteloupe.
All of the above of course applies perfectly equally to her husband, which of course puts one in the difficult position of wondering if Harvard really hand out PhDs to any mental deficient who pays them enough money.
He’s completely under her spell. Now everything he does is to make her happy.
What ‘they’ don’t want you to know is that the secret poison in chemtrails is greenhouse gases.
Once, in utter disgust, I asked my CT-believing BIL who totally believes chemtrails are a thing, why he thought he was so important that anyone would personally target HIM, and if he was being targeted, why anyone would think dispersing some chemical into the vapor high, high up above would be the way to do it. He had no answer, so instead he went into a fury.
Does anyone remember the private school in Flor-uh-duh that insisted amid a stack of dead bodies that Covid totally wasn’t a thing…but any teacher getting the vax would be fired because they were a danger to the children, shedding the virus? How could both be true?
I tend to think that people believe what’s convenient for themselves. Not always and I think most of us are honest enough that if someone proves us wrong, we’ll… well, act badly in the moment. But! There’s a fair chance that many of us will think about it later and figure out that we were wrong.
People that delve into these sorts of delusions aren’t like that. While I realize her confidence that her delusions are true could be an act, I don’t think it is. If she were willing to confront the ways that her delusions conflict with reality, she’d be dealing with those confrontations an awful lot. Her delusions sound like they cover quite a bit of her life.
Instead, I think she probably handles it the way you might converse with someone while avoiding topics that will upset them. Or cause other reactions you don’t feel like dealing with. When she knows conflicts between reality and her delusions will come up, I’d bet she’s very careful to direct her attention somewhere else so she simply doesn’t see it.