A new “freedom-based” Florida clinic aimed at patients suspicious of the mainstream medical establishment and staffed by doctors who were fired or disciplined for controversial stances on COVID-19, has drawn hundreds of patients in its first month, according to its owners.
The clinic, called We The People Health and Wellness Center, opened its doors in Venice, Florida on Sept. 7. In the last six weeks, 350 people have signed up to its subscription-model, which bypasses insurance companies, co-owner Vic Mellor told The Daily Beast.
The controversial backgrounds of some of the clinic’s staff, which includes doctors who were fired for their stances on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, is a point of pride for Mellor.
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“You can’t work here unless you’ve been fired by the establishment for believing in your patients first,” Mellor told The Daily Beast. “They’ve all been fired for it.”
Mellor, who made his money in the concrete business before becoming deeply involved in conservative activism in Florida, told The Daily Beast his motivation for founding the clinic was to offer health care to families and children he believes have been discriminated against by local doctors because they had chosen not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We’re not doing this for the money, we’re doing it for people and especially kids. It’s just barbaric what they’re doing to kids with these vaccines,” Mellor told The Daily Beast. “To me, it’s evil. At some point they will have to answer for that.”
Mellor believes We The People offers a “blueprint” for an alternative health-care system, one without the influence of insurance companies and “3rd party interference,” and patients direct their own care. He hopes the model will be replicated across the country and will encourage doctors whose views diverge from the medical establishment.
“I’m hoping that other doctors will see the light and get the courage and realize they can do this on their own,” Mellor said.
We The People is not Mellor’s first attempt to build a right-wing political community in Florida. After attending the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in support of Donald Trump, Mellor began to envisage a “campground for kids based on the Constitution,” according to a profile of him in the Washington Post.
He opened The Hollow 2A, a 10-acre lot in Venice that includes a campground, waterslides and a shooting range, where he offers lessons on the Constitution and gun safety for kids.
“Consistent with the United States Constitution and the Florida Constitution, The Hollow 2A is mandate-free, mask-free and censor-free. Make plans now to attend the next events here, meet with other like-minded Americans, combine our collective influence, and rescue America!” its website reads.
The new clinic shares a building with the recording studio where General Michael Flynn records his podcast, Michael Flynn’s Holy War. Mellor and Flynn are close, with Mellor recently becoming something of an unofficial spokesman for Flynn, according to the Washington Post.
Mellor’s key ally in setting up the clinic is local conservative activist Tanya Parus.
Parus, a mother-of-two and president of the Sarasota chapter of Moms For America, says she was incensed by her children’s school requiring masks during the pandemic.
She told The Daily Beast that during the height of the pandemic she began working with families to find doctors who could write mask waivers for their children, or were willing to prescribe off-label ivermectin for COVID.
“I was a conduit between people in the community and the doctors who were prescribing ivermectin and could treat them through telehealth or see them in their office,” she said. “I was seeing this huge, huge need.”
Parus, a former EMT, volunteered at a mass mask waiver signing at Mellor’s site, The Hollow 2A, in Sept. 2021. The turn-out inspired them both.
Mellor and Parus joined forces to found the clinic, where they are now co-owners, along with a third person whom Mellor declined to name.
When Parus began looking for staff for the clinic, she reached out to doctors around the country who lost their jobs for their stances on COVID-19.
“I really want to take the doctors’ letters of termination, and frame them, and put them all along this wall,” Paris told the podcast, pointing to the front wall of the clinic.
A review of the career history of We The People’s staff completed by The Daily Beast found that many of them had previously faced serious career consequences for their outspoken support of treatments of COVID-19 that were at odds with the rest of the medical community.
Dr. Joseph Chirillo, the clinic’s medical director for adults and pediatrics, said last year that he had treated his patients with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, according to the Herald-Tribune. (Both drugs received warnings from the FDA.) He also claimed during the pandemic that “masks are ineffective” and offered parents blank opt-out forms when Sarasota County schools mandated masks, the outlet reported.
Ivermectin is approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat parasites in animals and in humans, but not to treat or prevent COVID-19. However, the agency does not prohibit physicians from prescribing the drug off-label, and it has a strong following on the right. In cases where people self-administer the drug or take large doses, the FDA said in 2021, they can become seriously unwell.
Hydroxychloroquine, another anti-malarial drug much touted by former President Trump, has been found to cause heart problems in patients with COVID-19, the FDA says.
The physician in charge of pediatrics at We The People, Dr. Renata Moon, previously worked in Spokane, Washington and taught at Washington State University. She relinquished her Washington state license after the university told her that based on her public comments about the “dangers” of the COVID vaccine, she would be reported to the Washington Medical Commission, according to the Daily News. The university told her this summer her contract would not be renewed, the outlet reported.
Moon appeared at a roundtable in Washington in Dec. 2022, hosted by the Senate’s foremost COVID-skeptic, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), testifying to her belief that the COVID vaccine endangered children.
“We are being asked to inject this product into our nation's kids who have essentially a zero percent risk of harm,” Moon told the roundtable. “Other nations have banned this product because it's too dangerous for younger people. What are we doing?”
While some countries, such as Denmark, Sweden and the UK, have issued guidance that some healthy children do not need to get a COVID vaccine, no country has banned children from receiving it if stocks are available.
In a video shared to We The People’s TikTok page, Moon is shown addressing a meeting of Moms For America, describing how her own mother’s experiences had influenced her opinions on vaccines.
“Under communism, my mom was injected multiple times with whatever the school injected the children with,” Moon says in the video, posted on Oct. 2. “Tyrannical systems like, which is what we are experiencing, do not want parents involved.”
Natalie Iverson, a nurse practitioner at the clinic, signed 137 mask exemptions forms in a single day in Sept. 2021, an investigation by the Herald-Tribune found. At the time she was working at Millennium Physician Group in Port Charlotte, the paper reported, which later investigated her actions.
“She acted independently and did not request our authorization, and her actions should not be interpreted in any way as the guidance followed by Millennium Physician Group,” a spokesperson for the company told the newspaper.
There appears to be little that local regulators can do to prevent the clinic from offering unproven treatments for COVID-19 such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, according to Dr. Steven P. Rosenberg, a physician who chairs the “probable cause” panel of the Florida Medical Board.
The Board can take action only when a complaint is referred to them about a physician’s behavior, Rosenberg told The Daily Beast. These complaints are screened by the attorneys for the Health Department before they are referred, and Rosenberg says his panel has seen “surprisingly few” complaints regarding unproven COVID treatments.
“Very few if any cases are coming to the board. I don’t know whether they are inadequate complaints or why they’re not being pursued,” Rosenberg told The Daily Beast. “I think there’s some direction that prosecutors are getting.”
Although he cannot know for sure, Rosenberg believes that the prosecutors who handled the initial complaints within the Health Department are following recommendations that mean fewer COVID malpractice cases are being referred. In the past, he says, “a lot of those cases would have been prosecuted more aggressively.”
The change seems to track with a statewide turn against federal COVID advice. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, has aggressively fought against federal COVID guidelines, and has made “medical freedom” a cornerstone of his campaign for the Republican nomination.
In May, DeSantis signed a series of bills aimed at protecting physicians who choose to break from the mainstream medical establishment. The bills included a ban on any new vaccine or mask mandates in Florida, increased protections for doctors who prescribe “alternative treatments” or who chose not to prescribe certain treatments based on “moral, ethical or religious convictions,” and the creation of “a path for doctors to protect their license from medical or accreditation boards that are attempting to punish them for speaking out against the medical establishment.”
“These expanded protections will help ensure that medical authoritarianism does not take root in Florida,” DeSantis said at the time.
For her part, Parus is proud of the doctors and nurses at her clinic who took a stand on COVID and suffered career consequences as a result.
“Those are the doctors you want there. Those are the doctors that are going to stick up for you as a patient,” she told The Daily Beast.
On Sept. 7, the day the clinic opened to the public, red, white and blue balloons festooned the entrance. Inside, Parus welcomed Ann Vandersteel, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and right-wing media presenter for a tour.
Paris showed Vandersteel the framed American flag behind the clinic’s reception desk, shelves displaying the clinic’s supplement line, and books by the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, (whose claims about unproven COVID treatments purportedly reached former President Trump’s ear) and controversial pro-ivermectin figure Pierre Kory, co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
Kory, who is scheduled to give a book signing at the clinic this month, also released a video in support of the opening.
“This is exactly what we need in our health system right now. After everything that we’ve learned and been through in the last three years, it's clear that we need parallel health systems with full autonomy, no restrictions on practice,” Kory said in the video, which was released on We The People’s social media channels. “That’s what this clinic is going to do. I think its model is terrific.”
The clinic operates on a subscription-only model, meaning patients choose a membership plan and pay a monthly fee directly to We The People, rather than going through an insurance company.
“Once the insurance is involved in your practice, they govern everything that you do as a provider,” Parus told Vandersteel. “We want it to just be the provider taking care of you, and you making the final decisions for everything you want for your body, without any third party overreach.”
The clinic also offers a range of other services, including alternative therapies such as “red light therapy,” IV therapy, and vitamin shots.
“I’m signing up! Ditching my health insurance and signing up!,” Vandersteel told Parus. She explained she was about to travel to a “malaria zone” near the Panama Canal. “I’ll be getting my immune system rebooted and obviously prophylacting with hydroxychloroquine. All those things that y’all are going to take care of.”
Vandersteel is not the only happy customer at We The People, according to the clinic’s social media and two patients who spoke with The Daily Beast.
“Most of our patients, about 70 percent of our patients, haven’t been to a doctor since pre-COVID. So they have a lot of health problems that have not been addressed because they’ve been scared to go in and see a doctor,” Parus told The Daily Beast. “These are people who have untreated high blood pressure, things like that they've let go because they didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Wendy and Tim Shearer, a couple from Venice, told The Daily Beast they had felt alienated by their previous medical care, where they felt unwanted treatment was forced on them.
“You go in and they tell you should be having all these tests, when you don’t know why they think you should have these. You pay a bunch of money and they come back normal,” Wendy Shearer said. By contrast, she praised We The People’s attitude.
“The biggest draw is that they listen to us and we don’t get forced into taking medication that we don’t want to be taking, and doing different procedures we don’t think is necessary,” she said.
In a video posted to social media, another patient, only identified as “Scott,” shares his experience at We The People.
“I’ve had enough of the Kool Aid drinking doctors in this area and I’m tired of hearing about the vaccines,” Scott tells the camera, “These guys here, completely opposite of where I’ve been and I love it.”
Parus and Mellor say there are plans to expand We The People to more locations.
“I hope we can get more of our locations up nationwide or… they can see our model and duplicate our model, so that people have a place to go,” Parus said.
