Florida First Lady Suggests Horse Dewormer as Possible Cancer Treatment

In September 2025, Casey DeSantis spoke at the University of South Florida’s cancer symposium in Tampa, before an audience of physicians, researchers, and state officials. She highlighted the state’s billion-dollar commitment to oncology and emphasized prevention through diet and lifestyle. Then, drawing on both office and survivorship, she pointed to ivermectin — an antiparasitic drug the FDA has warned against for COVID-19 and which no regulator has approved for cancer treatment — as a generic the state “should look at” for possible repurposing.

That gesture placed ivermectin, once promoted as a populist panacea, inside Florida’s innovation agenda. While not a policy in itself, it signaled that official rhetoric could bend against consensus science.

Such moves have precedents.

In 1721, Cotton Mather defended smallpox inoculation with scripture and statistics, while critics denounced it as sorcery.

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis urged physicians to wash their hands, only to be dismissed and confined to an asylum.

A century later, Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko denounced genetics as “bourgeois pseudoscience,” crippling Soviet biology for decades.

The Tampa address was framed as part of a billion-dollar research initiative, but its language leaned less on trial design than on wellness tropes: eat better, exercise, make different choices.

Such advice is harmless on its own, yet in American politics it often carries a moral undertone: health as discipline, illness as lapse.

As both First Lady and cancer survivor, Casey DeSantis gave this rhetoric added weight.

She tapped a tradition in which women’s illness is recast as inspiration — from Betty Ford’s candor about breast cancer to Nancy Reagan’s personal appeals. Paired with a reference to ivermectin, the message shifted from symbolic to prescriptive: a low-cost outsider drug presented as promising, even suppressed.

Economic appeal sharpened the point.

Alternative cures often market themselves as democratic answers to “Big Pharma,” suggesting that cheap remedies must also be liberating.

Laetrile in the 1970s played this role. Marketed as a people’s cure, it drained savings, delayed proven treatment, and sent patients to Mexican clinics where studies later found no benefit and clear risks.

The scientific record is clear: no randomized clinical trial has shown that ivermectin treats cancer in humans.

As of 2025, systematic reviews in Current Oncology Reports and Acta Poloniae Pharmaceutica reach the same conclusion: laboratory studies show some anti-tumor effects, but no human trials confirm them.

At doses high enough to mirror lab effects, toxicity rises sharply. Reported outcomes include seizures, confusion, and liver injury. During COVID-19, U.S. poison-control centers saw a fourfold jump in ivermectin-related calls, prompting the FDA’s now-famous warning: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Consider a patient with early-stage breast cancer who, persuaded by rhetoric about “cheap miracles,” delays chemotherapy to try ivermectin. By the time she returns, her disease has metastasized. This is hypothetical, but the mechanism was tragically real during the laetrile era, when delays often cost patients their chance at survival.

Repurposed drugs can succeed — but only through rigorous trials.

Thalidomide, notorious for birth defects, became an established treatment for multiple myeloma only after years of controlled study.

Beta-blockers, designed for heart disease, later proved useful in oncology.

None were revealed from lecterns. Science advances beam by beam, trial by trial, until uncertainty yields to trust.

The hydroxychloroquine episode showed how a drug can become symbol more than therapy. Promoted in 2020 by President Donald Trump as a “game-changer,” it soon vanished from pharmacies, leaving lupus and arthritis patients without medication.

By midyear, trials rendered their verdict. The U.K.’s RECOVERY trial with over 11,000 patients, a U.S. outpatient study in NEJM, and the WHO’s Solidarity trial all agreed: no benefit, heightened cardiac risks. The FDA revoked its emergency use authorization in June 2020. Analysts later warned that misplaced reliance contributed to preventable harm.

Yet hydroxychloroquine’s force was never just pharmacological. It became a cultural emblem, a way to signal defiance of experts and loyalty to leadership. Trump’s refrain — “What do you have to lose?” — condensed the politics of miracle cures: simplicity in place of evidence, at the cost of safety.

Florida’s nod to ivermectin reprises this script. Nor is it unique.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro pushed chloroquine long after data showed harm; a 2025 study in BMC Public Health found surging use without benefit. In India, the government endorsed Ayurvedic remedies lacking trials. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán framed vaccine choice as sovereignty against Europe.

The choreography is consistent: leaders elevate cures as nationalist emblems, converting distrust of institutions into loyalty to power.

For cancer patients, delay is not preference but prognosis.

If Casey DeSantis provides symbols, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo supplies structure. A Harvard-trained physician with both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in health policy, Ladapo taught at UCLA before his 2021 appointment as Florida’s top health official and now holds a professorship at the University of Florida. Since taking office, he has advanced policies that recast skepticism as liberty. In September 2025, he proposed eliminating all childhood vaccine mandates — unprecedented in modern U.S. public health — and compared mandates to “slavery,” a claim PolitiFact judged false.

The consequences are already visible. Florida’s kindergarten vaccination rates have fallen, in some areas slipping below 90 percent, beneath the 95 percent generally required for herd immunity. The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that continued decline will open the door to outbreaks of measles, pertussis, and polio.

The inequities are stark. Black Floridians, long shaped by histories such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, have enduring reasons for distrust.

To liken mandates to slavery risks weaponizing that history, eroding trust in the very communities most exposed. Class divides compound the risk: affluent families can rely on private care or alternative schooling, while working-class families cannot.

This is a case study in the weaponization of credentials. Ladapo’s degrees and academic standing confer authority, yet here they are deployed to legitimize positions outside scientific consensus.

Once amplified by the state, such doubt hardens into doctrine. Its consequences are measured not in abstractions but in outbreaks, hospitalizations, and preventable deaths.

At the Tampa symposium, applause was polite but restrained. Suspicion of science had moved from margins to machinery of state. Florida calls its initiative hope; in practice, it stages hope as spectacle.

The stakes are not confined to oncology.

Once evidence is treated as optional in medicine, the same logic can spread to classrooms, courts, even ballot counts. The disbelief that corrodes hospitals can also hollow democracies.

Science has given societies their longest lives; pseudoscience has offered only detours and preventable deaths.

This conflict is lived, not abstract: in schools where measles resurfaces, in clinics where delayed treatment narrows survival, in homes where parents weigh doctors’ counsel against politicians’ claims.

Democracy, like science, rests on fragile trust. Laws, institutions, and norms are its supports. Remove them, and the collapse is not gradual but sudden.

Florida may believe it is fighting cancer. In truth, it is testing whether democracy can survive when evidence is no longer binding.