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.”

He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.

The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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.”