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…