AURA OF INVINCIBILITY

Meet the new-age healers behind Florida's anti-vax surgeon general.

- Kiera Butler & Julianne McShane

IN EARLY September, Dr. Joseph Ladapo took the podium at a Tampa news conference to make an unprecedented announcement: As Florida's surgeon general, he planned to eliminate “all vaccine mandates” in the state. “Who am I, as a man standing here,” he asked, hand over heart, “to tell you what you should put in your body?...Your body is a gift from God!” The audience roared in approval.

Since Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him in 2021, Ladapo, despite a sterling résumé—MD and PhD from Harvard, positions at NYU and UCLA medical schools—has developed a reputation as a rogue public health official. Former colleagues who remember him as a capable and highly collaborative scientist have been perplexed as he has rolled back Covid protections, questioned vaccine safety, and challenged the CDC. As one former collaborator from Boston Children’s Hospital told us, his old circles have asked: “How did this happen? Where did this come from?”

Ladapo has suggested the answers lie in his journey of personal transformation and the two people without whose help, he says, he'd “still be version 1.0”: his wife, Brianna, and Christopher Maher, a former Navy SEAL and guru whom the couple credits with saving their marriage. Maher declined to comment, and neither Ladapo nor Brianna responded to questions for this story, but in Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health, he credits a series of mystical experiences he shared with Maher with helping him realize that fear was corrosive, and the driving force for too many public health decisions.

In her own 2023 memoir,