The wife of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Casey DeSantis (who may or may not run for governor in 2026), announced Wednesday that the State of Florida is investing $60 Million in “Cancer Innovation Funding,” which she says will “support, in part, research into the benefits of repurposing generics, like ivermectin, to fight cancer.”
[Note: During the first Trump administration, in response to the pandemic, numerous right wing political pundits and media outlets promoted the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as an alternative to COVID-19 vaccines — without the drug’s having been approved for that use.]
Mrs. DeSantis said: “Generic medicines are often overlooked because they’re off-patent and don’t necessarily promise big profits. Florida is investing in researching them to learn more and hopefully uncover new ways to beat cancer.”
.@AllFamilyPharma has been a leader in making Ivermectin available! https://t.co/COedy0Mnl4 https://t.co/6DZdb3XBUi
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) September 25, 2025
Former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz (R), who served as a top campaign adviser to Ron DeSantis during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, amplified Mrs. DeSantis’s post about ivermectin and noted that the drug company he works for, All Family Pharmacy, “has been a leader in making Ivermectin available!” Gaetz provided a link to the company’s website.
Note: President Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr., Fox News star Laura Ingraham and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino have also served as spokespeople for All Family Pharma, which is owned by Michael Kuenzler, who has promoted his business on MAGA-aligned outlets including Right Side Broadcasting Network.
The company is careful, both on its website and in the ad copy read by its right-wing promoters, not to explicitly invoke the use of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 without disclaimers. But it’s very clear what’s going on. https://t.co/ELTMRIwgUX
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 2, 2025
On Howie Carr’s radio show in March, Kuenzler said his business took off during the pandemic due to “patients contacting us because their doctors were not prescribing medications that they felt were helpful toward the illnesses that they were having or enduring. My brother and I, we started pushing to help patients outside of their traditional PCP doctors get access to antibiotics, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, any drugs that physicians just purely weren’t prescribing for whatever reasons.”
On September 1, 2021, as ivermectin use rose during the pandemic, the American Medical Association (AMA), American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) issued a Joint Statement to “strongly oppose the ordering, prescribing, or dispensing of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.”
Those like DeSantis who continue to support research into alternative ivermectin uses are buoyed by potential described in research papers such as ‘Ivermectin: A Multifaceted Drug With a Potential Beyond Anti-parasitic Therapy‘ by three professors at a university in Clearwater, Florida.