Sunshine State, Shadowed Past: William Makis Arrives in Florida
William Makis built a medical empire on ivermectin, conspiracy, and the desperate. The courts caught up with him. Florida didn’t care.
Chad Green was three years old when he died in a cancer clinic in Tijuana. The year was 1979. I was eight. I remember it because it was everywhere, and because a friend of mine, Teresa Powers, had a sister with leukemia who died from it, and the reporter on the news said Chad’s leukemia was treatable. Survival rate for his type, at the time, fifty percent. Today it is eighty. He died because his parents stopped the chemotherapy and drove their dying child across a border to be treated with apricot pits.
Gerald and Diana Green were not monsters. They were scared working-class parents who had watched their toddler writhe through brutal treatment and decided, with a desperation that is not hard to understand, that there had to be something better. The injections had turned Chad, at times, into what his mother described as a wild animal. So they put their faith in laetrile, a compound derived from apricot pits that its promoters called Vitamin B-17 and the medical establishment called what it was: a useless drug with a cyanide byproduct slowly poisoning the child it claimed to save. The fringe movement behind laetrile used his face as its martyr right up until the child was dead, at which point it moved on to the next desperate family. Legal battles over the case climbed to the Supreme Court. It became a landmark in the history of parental rights against medical authority. It also became, for a few decades, a warning severe enough to push the worst of this industry toward the margins.
The margins did not hold. They never do.
William Makis is not a doctor. He was, once. A nuclear medicine radiologist trained in Alberta, the author of more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, a credentialed insider at Alberta Health Services. That is the biography he still leads with because it is the only part of the story that flatters him, so it is the part he repeats, a credential worn like a costume long after the performance ended. His active Alberta medical license lapsed in February 2019. What followed was not a quiet retirement. It was a reinvention built on the bones of his professional disgrace.
Before the Substack empire, there were the lawsuits. After being terminated from Alberta Health Services following professional complaints, and found guilty of unprofessional conduct by a College of Physicians and Surgeons tribunal in 2018, Makis sued AHS and several colleagues, alleging conspiracies and misconduct. Courts repeatedly rejected his claims. Alberta courts eventually designated him a vexatious litigant, an extremely rare status reserved for individuals who abuse the legal system with bad-faith filings. He alleged a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy involving AHS, lawyers, and judges. The courts were not persuaded. They rarely are when the evidence is paranoia dressed as litigation. A man who cannot win in court finds other audiences. Makis found the internet. The internet, as it always does, was ready for him.
The pitch he developed is elegant in the way that cons are elegant: simple, emotionally irresistible, and designed to be unfalsifiable. COVID-19 vaccines, Makis claims, cause a new and terrifying phenomenon he calls “turbo cancer.” Turbo cancers, in his telling, are aggressive, rapid-onset malignancies that strike the vaccinated, particularly in younger cohorts, are resistant to conventional treatment, and are rising fast. The oncological community has not recognized this phenomenon. Makis has an explanation for that: they are hiding it, or bought off, or simply too compromised to see what he alone can see. The term did not exist before 2021. It was coined in anti-vaccine circles and popularized largely by Makis himself, spreading from fringe Substacks to mainstream-adjacent platforms with remarkable speed. It is a masterpiece of medical branding. The name alone implies urgency, novelty, and a secret. The kind of thing your oncologist would never tell you. The kind of thing only he is brave enough to say.
The cure, conveniently, is ivermectin. Makis claims the antiparasitic drug works against cancer through at least fifteen distinct biological pathways. He runs what he describes as an “Ivermectin Cancer Clinic” promoting high-dose ivermectin and repurposed antiparasitic drugs for cancer care. The clinic markets protocols for every cancer grade, categorized by severity and priced accordingly. The actual science on ivermectin and cancer is preliminary at best. There is a small body of preclinical data, laboratory studies on cancer cells and animal models, suggesting possible anti-tumor activity. One clinical trial involving ivermectin and breast cancer is currently underway. The results of that trial will determine whether any of this translates to human patients. Makis is not waiting for results. He is selling protocols now, to people who are dying now. That is the whole point. Dying people cannot wait for peer review. Makis knows this. His business depends on it.
He built a six-figure subscription operation on Substack, with over 118,000 subscribers paying between five and fifty dollars a month. His header promises “INTEL on COVID-19, mRNA Vaccines, Turbo Cancer, Cancer Therapy, Ivermectin, Mebendazole, Fenbendazole.” A disclaimer at the bottom notes the content is “not medical advice.” This is the tell. It is the fine print that separates a media business from a medical practice, legally, while doing nothing to change what a terrified cancer patient actually does with the information at two in the morning after the oncologist has delivered the news and left the room. Makis knows who is reading. He is not writing for the curious. He is writing for the desperate, and the desperate are an audience that will pay whatever the protocol costs because the alternative is accepting that they are going to die.
The laetrile promoters of the 1970s worked this same territory. Banned in the United States, they sent their patients to Mexican clinics, sold hope in newspaper ads, and watched desperate people spend their final months on a compound derived from apricot pits while their actual cancers progressed. The regulatory apparatus eventually caught up with most of them. What distinguishes Makis is not the scheme. The scheme is ancient. What distinguishes him is the infrastructure. The Substack gives him direct access to subscribers without a distributor, an editor, or a regulator in the chain. The “not medical advice” disclaimer gives him legal cover. The “turbo cancer” brand gives him a captive audience that self-selects for fear and distrust of exactly the institutions that might otherwise protect them. And the MAHA political moment gives him a legitimacy the laetrile crowd never had. The term “turbo cancer,” his invention, has migrated into serious institutional spaces, cited approvingly at MAHA Institute events and amplified by figures with actual oncological credentials who should know better. This is how misinformation scales: not through the fringes alone, but through the occasional credentialed voice that gives it just enough respectability to travel.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta eventually had enough. After growing concerns that Makis was presenting himself as a physician and providing medical advice without an active license, the College pursued legal action. In August 2025, the Court of King’s Bench granted an interim injunction. On March 4, 2026, it granted a permanent one. The terms are specific. Makis is restricted from representing or implying that he is licensed to practice medicine in Alberta, restricted from offering or providing any health services to the public including advice or consultations regarding cancer treatment, and prohibited from using the title of doctor, oncologist, the abbreviation Dr., or any of the protected titles under Alberta’s Health Professions Act. The court’s reasoning was blunt. The risk to the public lies in the unauthorized practice of medicine. Proof of actual harm to specific individuals is not required. The act itself is the harm. Worth noting: the CPSA was explicit that its case was never about any specific medication. This is not a war on ivermectin. It is an action against a man who spent years selling medical authority he no longer possessed to people too frightened to check his credentials.
Makis, predictably, characterized the injunction as persecution. He blamed Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. And then he announced he was applying for a Florida medical license. Florida’s Board of Medicine issued a notice of intent to approve his licensure with conditions. This is not a surprise. It is almost a perfect outcome for a man who has spent years exploiting the gap between what the rules say and what the rules do.
Florida’s own statute, Section 458.331(1)(b), is unambiguous. Having a license “revoked, suspended, or otherwise acted against” by another jurisdiction constitutes grounds for disciplinary action in Florida. The law is on the books. But statutory authority is not the same as practice, and the gap between them is where Makis intends to operate. There is also what practitioners in this field call the surrender trick. A physician under investigation in one state can voluntarily surrender his license before formal revocation proceedings conclude. The end result is the same: the doctor can no longer practice in that state. But the accountability is different. When a physician surrenders rather than faces revocation, the full record may not surface in a standard search. And surrender is voluntary. It is up to the doctor to surrender in every state, not the licensing board. Most doctors simply do not do that. Surrender in one jurisdiction, keep the others, move to Florida.
Florida’s sluggishness on physician oversight is not purely bureaucratic incompetence. There is political scaffolding holding it in place. The state funds the defense of accused physicians during disciplinary proceedings. The agency doing the investigating has been gutted by a $55.6 million budget cut that left it structurally unable to run a robust licensing review. The medical lobby in Tallahassee has been effective for decades. The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, designed to address physician shortages, processes new license applications in one to three business days while discipline cases rot in a queue that can stretch past a year. The asymmetry is not accidental. Florida has a large, aging, medically dependent population, a documented physician shortage, a Surgeon General with his own complicated relationship with medical consensus, and an oversight apparatus that looks appropriately structured on paper and is functionally inert in practice. Florida does not accept doctors like Makis because it doesn’t know about them. It accepts them because the people who built the system preferred it that way.
The injunction in Alberta is a start. It is not a solution. The Substack is still running. The protocols are still priced and available. The audience is still there, still desperate, still paying.
Chad Green’s parents spent their son’s final months in a Tijuana clinic, watching him die of a curable disease while a fringe movement told them they were brave dissenters fighting a corrupt medical establishment. The movement did not mourn him. It used him, and then it found the next family. Forty-five years later, the delivery mechanism is more sophisticated. The branding is sharper. The political cover is real in a way it never was for the laetrile circuit. But the business model is identical: find the dying, give them a name for what they fear, sell them something that isn’t medicine, and make sure the fine print says so. The only thing that has genuinely changed is that this time, the man running the clinic is headed to Florida with a new license number and a clean search result, and the next desperate family is already subscribing.
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