Under injunction in Alberta, licensed in Florida: the Viliam Makis file
In March 2026 an Alberta judge found Viliam Makis in civil contempt and granted a permanent injunction barring him from calling himself a doctor or giving cancer advice. In June he told the Court of Appeal that Albertans were safe because he was moving to Florida. On 7 August 2026 he appeared on Florida's public register of physicians.
A note on the name
He is styled both ways in the record. The Court of King’s Bench of Alberta captions the case “Viliam Makis, also known as William Makis” and the judgment’s findings begin “Viliam Makis obtained an MD degree from McGill University in 2005.” The College of Physicians & Surgeons of Alberta heads its own public statement “William (Viliam) Makis.” Most news coverage uses William. This page uses Viliam, the name the court uses, and the two refer to the same person.
A correction to this page, 23 October 2026
Until today the headline of this page read “Struck off in Alberta.” That was wrong, and it was wrong in a way that understated the story.
Viliam Makis was never struck off. The College’s register records his Alberta registration as inactive and cancelled for non-payment of fees, since February 2019. He stopped paying and walked away.
That matters because of what follows from it. A physician who resigns his registration is no longer a member of the College, and a College can only discipline its own members. There was no licence left to revoke, no hearing to hold, and no professional sanction available to anyone. That is precisely why the College had to do something colleges almost never do: go to the Court of King’s Bench and ask a judge for an injunction, because the ordinary machinery of medical regulation could not touch him.
“Struck off” would have meant the system worked. What actually happened is that it could not be made to work at all, and a court had to be substituted for it.
What this page claims, and what it does not
Everything in the Alberta section comes from the published decisions of the Court of King's Bench and the Court of Appeal of Alberta and from the public statements of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. Civil contempt is not a criminal conviction. No criminal charge has been laid against Dr. Makis and none is alleged here.
No patient of his is said on this page to have been harmed. No finding has been made that any treatment he recommended injured anyone. What the record establishes is narrower and, for a Canadian reader, more immediately useful: what a regulator and two levels of court found, what he told the court, and where he went next.
Nothing here suggests the Florida Board of Medicine acted improperly. The question this page raises about Florida is a different one — what the Board knew, and what a licence means when it is granted to someone a Canadian court has enjoined.
The Alberta sequence, in order
The argument he made, and what happened to it
The part of the Court of Appeal record worth dwelling on is not the law. It is what he offered the court as reassurance.
Asked why the Alberta order should be stayed, he submitted that he had moved his primary residence to Florida for legitimate professional reasons, that his wife held a power of attorney to sell the Edmonton house, and that any risk to the Alberta public was therefore effectively moot — because he had conditional approval to practise medicine in Florida.
Read that argument twice
The submission is that Albertans need not be protected from him because another jurisdiction has agreed to license him. It treats a licence as a destination rather than a standard. The Court of Appeal was unimpressed, but it refused permission to appeal on conventional grounds — no arguable question, no prospect of success — rather than on the merits of that reasoning.
Seven weeks later the conditional approval became licence ME183817. The argument, in other words, worked out exactly as he said it would. Not in the Alberta courtroom, where it failed. In Florida, where it was never tested.
Venice, October 2025: who spoke, and who paid for the room
The event was called The 3 Big C's: Courage, Censorship & Cancer. It was held at the Venice Community Center in Sarasota County, Florida, and drew a crowd reported at several hundred. It was sponsored by the We The People Health and Wellness Center. Makis gave the keynote.
It honoured Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida. A panel at the event was chaired by Brianna Ladapo, his wife, who is described in KFF Health News reporting as a self-proclaimed spiritual healer who says she speaks with angels.
One correction to a detail that circulates online, including in material we were sent: Brianna Ladapo does not run the clinic. The centre was founded and is owned by Vic Mellor, the chief executive of a local concrete business, whom KFF describes as having marched on 6 January. On the clinic's own team page Brianna Ladapo is listed as an Integrative Health Coach, alongside a physician and a nurse practitioner. The site's own disclaimer states that she does not diagnose, prescribe, treat, interpret testing or direct medication changes. Getting this right is not a favour to anyone. It is the difference between a claim that survives contact with a lawyer and one that does not.
The clinic, and who vouches for it
We The People Health and Wellness Center opened on 7 September 2023 at 959 E. Venice Avenue in Venice, Florida, on a subscription membership model. Its published menu of services includes red light therapy, ozone therapy, peptide therapy, NAD+ infusion, hyperbaric oxygen, EBOO, PRP, medical weight loss, IV therapy and vitamin shots. It offers no vaccines. KFF Health News reported that children have been treated there for autism with an experimental blood concentrate. The premises include a broadcasting studio.
The endorsements are not an allegation by us. They are on the clinic's own homepage, which invites visitors to watch Dr. Sherri Tenpenny and Dr. Pierre Kory give what the site itself calls their full endorsement.
| Endorser | What happened to their own credentials | Why it matters here |
|---|---|---|
| Sherri Tenpenny, DO | Her Ohio osteopathic medical licence was suspended by the State Medical Board of Ohio in August 2023 for failing to cooperate with an investigation, and reinstated in April 2024 after she agreed to pay a $3,000 fine. She is best known publicly for 2021 testimony to the Ohio House suggesting COVID-19 vaccines could make people magnetic. | A clinic that advertises her approval is telling you what it considers an authority. |
| Pierre Kory, MD | His certification by the American Board of Internal Medicine in critical care medicine and pulmonary disease was revoked by August 2024 over COVID-19 misinformation. He retains a licence to practise. | Board certification is the specialty profession's own judgment of competence. Losing it is not a licensing matter; it is the field itself withdrawing. |
| Viliam Makis, MD | Permanent injunction and civil contempt finding in Alberta, March 2026; permission to appeal refused, June 2026. Licensed in Florida, August 2026. | The keynote speaker — licensed in Florida seven weeks after an Alberta appeal court refused to hear him, with no conditions on the licence. |
The sixty million dollars
This is the part that moves the story out of the realm of a badly-run clinic and into public policy.
On 24 September 2025 the Governor of Florida and the First Lady announced a $60 million funding opportunity under the Florida Cancer Innovation Fund, established through the Casey DeSantis Cancer Research Program under s. 381.915 of the Florida Statutes and administered by the Florida Department of Health. The state's own announcement lists among its priorities nutrition-focused projects, including the repurposing of generic drugs — and names ivermectin as an example.
A few days after the Venice event, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said in a video posted to social media that he hoped to support Makis's work through that fund. He heads the department that administers it.
What is actually being proposed
Makis treats cancer patients with antiparasitic drugs — ivermectin, fenbendazole, mebendazole — and promotes the claim that a wave of aggressive “turbo cancers” has been caused by impurities in mRNA vaccines. That claim has no support in the oncology literature. Neither ivermectin nor fenbendazole has been shown in any adequate human trial to treat cancer.
At the moment the Surgeon General said this, Makis was under an Alberta interim injunction forbidding him to give cancer advice, and was four months from being found in contempt of it.
The 2018 order, and what it was actually about
Eight years before the injunction, a different Alberta judge made a different and far more unusual order against him. It is worth setting out carefully, because it is routinely described in a way that is wrong, and because what it concerns is not cancer, ivermectin, fenbendazole or vaccines.
In Makis v Alberta Health Services, 2018 ABQB 976, Justice Clackson found him to be a vexatious litigant and ordered that he must obtain the Court’s permission before he could “commence, attempt to commence, or continue any complaint, investigation, proceeding or appeal” with any non-judicial body, where the matter related to issues raised in three actions then before the Court. Notice must go to Alberta Health Services and to the College, and to any individual named. The costs already awarded against him had to be paid first.
The three actions were an employment dispute over his termination, a judicial review of a College decision about complaints he had made against another physician, and a broader claim against several physicians, their professional corporations and the University of Alberta alleging a conspiracy to undermine his career. Justice Clackson described the first two as having “some prospect of success.” This was a workplace and regulatory fight, and nothing in it concerned how to treat cancer.
What makes the order remarkable is its reach. The bodies the applicants said needed protecting were not only the health authority and the College but the Edmonton Police Service, the RCMP, the Alberta Human Rights Office, the Public Interest Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the Minister of Health, the University of Alberta, “and any other body which Dr. Makis might contact in the future.” The judge said his obligation was to protect those who might yet suffer from what he called “abuse of the non-court processes.”
What became of the civil actions
They are over, and they ended on a procedural point rather than on the merits.
In July 2023 the Court of Appeal refused him permission to appeal the dismissal of his own applications — he had asked the court to declare the respondents vexatious litigants. It did, however, give him leave to appeal the orders striking out his second action and his claim against the College, on condition that he post $20,000 as security for costs by 30 September 2023. The court said it would dismiss the appeals without it.
He did not post it, and did not ask for more time. About eighteen months later, in March 2025, he applied to restore the two appeals, by then deemed abandoned. His counsel said he had been unable to earn income after losing his licence and his employment, and that the money had since been raised through a fundraiser.
On 23 April 2025, in Makis v Alberta Health Services, 2025 ABCA 139, the Court of Appeal refused. It found the delay extraordinary and unexplained, presumed prejudice to the respondents from the passage of time, called his affidavit vague and unhelpful for failing to explain why no extension had been sought, and held his proposed undertaking to pay within fourteen days unenforceable. Any arguable merit in the appeals was not enough to outweigh the rest.
The claim at the centre of it
The second action was against the University of Alberta and a number of physicians. According to the legal press reporting the case, it alleged a broad criminal conspiracy involving numerous individuals, their lawyers, and members of the judiciary, said to be aimed at ending his career, together with breach of contract, negligence and misfeasance in public office.
It also alleged that his removal from the cancer institute had resulted in the “murders of or serious harming of 2456 Alberta cancer patients.”
That pleading was filed years before the fenbendazole protocol, the cancer coaching, the Venice clinic or the Florida licence. It is the same structure the reader will recognise from his current work: a precise-looking number, a claim of mass institutional killing, and himself as the one person who could have prevented it. The chronology matters. This way of thinking did not arrive with the cancer business. It preceded it.
Two qualifications this page will not leave out
The judge himself called it unusual and new. Justice Clackson acknowledged in the decision that restricting a litigant’s non-court activities was an unusual step and a new one for the Court. It was appealed, and in 2020 the Court of Appeal partly allowed that appeal, so the order as finally made was narrower than the one Professor Watson Hamilton was writing about. The vexatious designation itself survived: five years on it was still in force, which is why he needed the Court of Appeal’s permission to appeal at all in 2023.
It was criticised by legal academics, and the criticism is serious. Writing for the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog, Professor Jonnette Watson Hamilton argued the order extended the court’s inherent jurisdiction without a statutory basis, made administrative tribunals answerable to a court for what they may hear, and rested on reasoning advanced too briefly for a question of that size. Reporting the order without reporting that would be reporting half of it.
Why this is here, and the line it does not cross
Filing complaints with regulators is a legitimate thing for a citizen or a physician to do, and this site exists largely because people do it. Volume alone proves nothing, and a person who makes many complaints is not thereby a vexatious litigant.
What distinguishes this case is that a superior court judge, after full process, made a finding about how those processes were being used — and then, in 2026, an entirely separate set of proceedings found him in civil contempt over something else again. The 2018 order is relevant context for a reader assessing the 2026 injunction. It is not evidence about cancer treatment, and this page does not offer it as such.
The Florida licence, verified
Until today this page said he was licensed in Florida on the strength of his own announcement. It is now confirmed from the primary source. The Florida Department of Health’s practitioner verification, data as of 23 October 2026, records:
- Name on the licence
- VILIAM MAKIS — the Department spells it with one L, as he does
- Licence
- ME183817, Medical Doctor
- Status
- Clear/Active
- Qualifications
- Dispensing Practitioner
- Issued
- 7 August 2026
- Expires
- 31 January 2029
- Address of record
- 959 E Venice Ave, Venice, FL 34285
- Controlled substance prescriber
(chronic non-malignant pain) - No
- Discipline on file
- No — no discipline cases, no emergency actions, no public complaints
Source: Florida Department of Health, Division of Medical Quality Assurance, licence verification for ME183817, retrieved 23 October 2026.
Two things on that record deserve more attention than the licence itself.
The date
Florida issued this licence on 7 August 2026.
On 4 March 2026 an Alberta judge had found him in civil contempt and granted a permanent injunction barring him from holding himself out as a doctor or giving cancer advice. On 17 June 2026 the Alberta Court of Appeal refused him permission to appeal, finding no important question of law, no reasonable prospect of success, and no error in the sanction, and awarded costs against him.
Florida licensed him seven weeks later.
Whether the Board of Medicine knew about the Alberta orders is not something this page can answer, and the application file is not public. What can be said is that the licence carries no discipline, no conditions and no restrictions, and that an injunction granted by a Canadian court does not appear anywhere on a Florida record.
“Dispensing Practitioner”
That qualification means he is registered in Florida to dispense medicinal drugs directly from his office rather than writing a prescription that a pharmacy fills.
It is worth pausing on what that removes. In Ontario, the two physicians who ended up with undertakings never to prescribe ivermectin, and the one whose licence was revoked, were all reported by pharmacists — the professional who sees the prescription, recognises the dose or the indication as wrong, and picks up the phone. In the Canadian record documented on this site, the pharmacist is the single most reliable point at which inappropriate prescribing has been caught.
A dispensing practitioner hands the patient the drug himself. There is no second professional in the room.
The licence does not authorise him to prescribe controlled substances for chronic non-malignant pain; the Department records that separately, and the answer there is no.
The paper, and why it was retracted
On 21 January 2026 the journal Case Reports in Oncology retracted a paper of which Makis was first author: “Fenbendazole as an Anticancer Agent? A Case Series of Self-Administration in Three Patients,” by William Makis, Ilyes Baghli and Pierrick Martinez, published the previous year at Case Rep Oncol 2025;18:856–863.
The stated ground is narrow, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. The editors recorded a “potential undeclared conflict of interest by the first author,” who, at the time the manuscript was submitted, “offered services related to the topic of the study.” That activity “was not declared in the conflict of interest statement of the article.” The editors concluded that the concerns “would have affected the interpretation of the work and recommendation,” and that the author’s responses when they put the matter to him were unsatisfactory.
What that means in plain words
He was selling the thing he was publishing about, and the paper did not say so.
Three patients who dosed themselves, written up by an author with an undisclosed commercial interest in the subject, in a case-reports journal — a format that by its nature proves nothing, because it has no control group and reports only the outcomes someone chose to write up. It was then cited as evidence, in good faith, by people who had no way of knowing any of this.
The retraction does not establish that the patients did not improve, and it is not a finding that fenbendazole does nothing. It establishes something narrower and, for a reader trying to decide what to believe, more useful: the single most-cited paper in this literature came from someone with a financial stake he did not disclose, and the journal that published it no longer stands behind it.
Why this belongs on a Canadian site
Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.
First, he is ours. He trained and practised in Canada, built his following here during the pandemic, and was enjoined by a Canadian court. Canadian readers who encounter him online are entitled to know what the Court of King's Bench of Alberta found, and that a permanent injunction against him remains in force in this country.
Second, the injunction does not travel. An Alberta order binds conduct in Alberta. It does not stop a Substack, a YouTube channel or a podcast appearance from reaching an Albertan with a new diagnosis at two in the morning. The College has said it continues to monitor compliance. Monitoring is what a regulator can do; it is not the same as the problem being solved.
Third, and this is the reason the page sits beside the RFK Jr. running file rather than in the Bad MD folder: the pattern. A practitioner loses standing in one jurisdiction, relocates to one that has made ideological alignment a licensing-adjacent virtue, and within a year a state health official is proposing public research money for the protocol that cost him his standing in the first place. That is not a story about one Albertan. It is a working model, and there is nothing about it that could not be attempted here.
What a Canadian patient should take from this
A Florida medical licence is a real licence. It is not a rehabilitation. It says that the State of Florida has concluded he meets its requirements to practise there. It does not say that an Alberta court was wrong, that the contempt finding was vacated, or that antiparasitic drugs treat cancer. None of those things happened.
If you or someone you love has a cancer diagnosis and has been pointed toward fenbendazole or ivermectin, the single most useful thing you can do is take the suggestion to your own oncologist and ask them directly. They will not be angry. They have had this conversation before.
A note on the spelling of his name
His name is spelled Viliam. The Alberta regulator's public record and the court citations render it Viliam, with one L, and most American reporting — KFF Health News and CNN among them — uses William. We note all three only so that a reader searching the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta's register, CanLII, or the Florida Department of Health licence verification database finds the record rather than an empty result.
A note on how this page is written
Court findings are reported as court findings and attributed to their citations. First-party material — the clinic's own website, the State of Florida's own press release, his own Substack, the regulator's own statement — is preferred to any secondary account of it, and is identified as first-party where it is used. Where a claim circulating online turned out to be wrong, as with the ownership of the clinic, we have said so in the body rather than quietly dropping it.
Dr. Makis is welcome to respond. Corrections will be posted.
Sources. On the Alberta proceedings: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta v Makis, 2026 ABKB 159 (Mah J., 4 March 2026), as published by the College and by Canadian Lawyer; CPSA v Makis, 2026 ABCA 198 (Feth J.A., 17 June 2026), and Canadian Lawyer's reports of both decisions, 25 June 2026; the earlier appeal decision 2026 ABCA 17; the interim injunction of 15 August 2025; the College's public statements of 24 June 2025 and subsequent updates; and the summary of the contempt and permanent injunction published by Mathews Dinsdale. On the retraction: the retraction statement published in Case Reports in Oncology 2026;19(1):169, doi 10.1159/000549387, 21 January 2026, retracting Case Rep Oncol 2025;18:856–863, doi 10.1159/000546362. On the 2018 order: Makis v Alberta Health Services, 2018 ABQB 976 (Clackson J.), as analysed by Jonnette Watson Hamilton, “Court of Queen’s Bench Requires Vexatious Litigant to Seek Court’s Permission Before Accessing Any Non-Judicial Body,” ABlawg, University of Calgary Faculty of Law, 21 December 2018; the JSS Barristers summary of Makis v Alberta Health Services, 2023 ABCA 214 (Pentelechuk J.A.); Makis v Alberta Health Services, 2025 ABCA 139 (23 April 2025) and the 2020 appeal, as reported by Bernise Carolino, “Alberta Court of Appeal refuses to restore appeals due to lack of security for costs,” Canadian Lawyer, 1 May 2025. On the Florida licence: Florida Department of Health, Division of Medical Quality Assurance, practitioner licence verification for ME183817, data as of 23 October 2026. On the Alberta registration status: the public register of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. On Venice and the clinic: Arthur Allen, KFF Health News, republished by WUSF Health News Florida, At The Hollow in Florida, the ‘Medical Freedom’ Movement Finds Its Base Camp, 31 October 2025; the We The People Health and Wellness Center's own website, including its team page and its published endorsements. On the Florida funding: Florida Department of Health press release, 24 September 2025, announcing the $60 million Florida Cancer Innovation Fund opportunity under the Casey DeSantis Cancer Research Program, s. 381.915 Fla. Stat. On the Florida licence: the Florida Department of Health MQA licence verification database, first searched 7 August 2026 and re-verified 23 October 2026 (licence ME183817). On board certification and licensure of the named endorsers: the American Board of Internal Medicine's published revocation notices and the State Medical Board of Ohio's orders, as reported by Science-Based Medicine and contemporaneous news coverage.
Corrections are welcome and will be posted. QuackeryWatch is a non-commercial consumer information site operated by Terry Polevoy, MD, FRCPC.
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