Regular SBM readers are no doubt familiar with Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s Surgeon General and head of the state’s Department of Health since 2021. Dr. Ladapo first rose to prominence in 2020 in the early months of the pandemic as a prominent member of the group of crank physicians and pandemic minimizers known as America’s Frontline Doctors. It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been six years since this group first made a splash in the news by promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19, even as rapidly arranged clinical trials were showing that it did not work, leading me to call it the “Black Knight of treatments for COVID-19,” a nod to the infamous Black Knight scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Uncoincidentally, Dr. Ladapo was also a signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, that “declaration” co-authored by our current NIH Director and orchestrated by a right-wing think tank and neo-Confederate conspiracy theorist Jeffrey Tucker that called for a “let ‘er rip” strategy for dealing with the pandemic, claiming that …