Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

Brianna Ladapo, the wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, claims her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted

The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo — Brianna Ladapo — says angels have spoken to her, claims “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has asserted that her husband “won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.”

In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo — who edited Dr Ladapo’s March 2020 USA Today op-ed opposing Covid-19 shutdowns and often appears alongside him at conferences — describes regularly receiving visions that later come true and says angels have saved her life “multiple times.”

Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic handpicked by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has been accused by public-health advocates of promoting “scientific nonsense.” He has defended his positions on vaccines and Covid guidance; in 2023, responding to allegations he falsified a Covid report, he said: “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 for preventable diseases — measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis — comparing mandates to “slavery” and saying the decision would receive the blessing “of God.” Florida became the first US state to remove those mandates.

The Guardian reported it made repeated attempts to contact Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email; they did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and Governor DeSantis also did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s move to end vaccine mandates, alleging “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines,” and writing: “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 said she trusted her gut and intuition during the Covid pandemic: “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 that before the pandemic began in early 2020 she was “having visions, I was having dreams,” and saw “ridiculous inconsistencies” emerge.

She also spoke in January 2025 with the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, saying: “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 joined his wife onstage at conferences about health and parenting. In his 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that Brianna has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws.” He noted that his March 2020 USA Today op-ed opposing shutdowns — the first of several on the virus — was edited by his wife, and that when he was recruited to be Florida’s surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife described it as “the message she was waiting for.”

In her 2023 memoir, Brianna Ladapo wrote: “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 said she has received “constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass.” She also recounted a “pilgrimage” to Egypt in graduate school where she says she completed a “recurring vision” from a past life.

Earlier this year on Rumble, she reiterated claims about her “gifts,” saying she 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,” and that family members once perceived her experiences 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 said.

Brianna Ladapo claims their children “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and possess “innate divine intelligence.” She said one of her children briefly shared a “gift” with her as an infant: “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.”

She says her husband was initially skeptical but eventually came to accept her experiences: “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 comment when asked about her vetting.

In the July podcast, she described a session with a former Navy SEAL turned self-described traditional healer during which she said she floated an inch above the ground; she added that her husband had similar experiences with that healer. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.

Brianna Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory, claiming that planes are mass-dumping chemicals that sickened her and her children and that she used a patch characterized by medical experts as pseudoscience. She described attempts to “chase down where this is coming from” — who funds the companies, who pilots the planes, and where they take off — and complained, “We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.”

Pointing to a photo of the sky outside her Florida home, she said: “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 those she believes responsible as “dark forces” trying to stop the couple: “They’ve been trying to stop us for years. 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.”