Guylaine Lanctôt

Ghis (born Guylaine Lanctôt; 1941 – 4 May 2025) was a Canadian phlebologist who was barred from practising medicine in 1996. A major figure of the anti-vaccination movement in Quebec and France from the 1990s onwards, she was also an AIDS denialist and a sovereign citizen ideologue.

Youth Lanctôt was born in 1941.

At the age of 14, Lanctôt was expelled from college, owing to her disruptive behaviour and lack of interest in classwork. Freed from her school obligations, she worked as a secretary and horse riding instructor. She enrolled into the Collège français after two years out of school and pursued studies in medicine in Paris and Montreal. Lanctôt married a physician with whom she had four children; the marriage ended in 1978.

With her sister Henriette, she founded the Bottin des femmes in 1981, which would soon develop into Quebec's businesswomen's association.

During the 1980s, Lanctôt owned several cosmetic medicine clinics in Canada and the United States. She moved to Florida in 1984 and concentrated her efforts on the American market, as the Quebec public health insurance program delisted cosmetic phlebology treatments.

Produced by her own publishing house, the book alleged the existence of a vast conspiracy involving the medical and pharmaceutical professions, as well as financial and political interests. The text is punctuated with spiritual beliefs relating to human health based on new age culture rather than medical knowledge. It argues cancer is a benefit and that vaccines threaten the continued existence of the human species. Lanctôt declared bankruptcy as those proceedings were under way, despite selling her American clinics to her associates for a sum of $650,000 as well as her clinics in Montreal, Laval and Toronto.

In 2001, Lanctôt spoke out against a province-wide vaccination campaign against meningitis, decrying the vaccine as "a biological weapon testing tool" and repeating her belief that all diseases have psychic causes. She then went by the name Ghislaine Saint-Pierre Lanctôt and lived in Stukely-Sud.

Faced with her refusal to file tax returns since 1995, after repeated warnings a court order was issued against Lanctôt in September 2008, leading to her arrest by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She turned down a conditional release agreement and was incarcerated for two months and thereafter fined $1,000. Throughout the proceedings, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of the courts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she argued the public health emergency was "a lie" during speaking engagements and social media interviews.

Canadian singer Bernard Lachance kept up a sustained correspondence with Lanctôt during the period when he became a conspiracy theorist in regard to AIDS. Lachance discontinued his tritherapy treatments and died from bacterial sepsis on 11 March 2021.

Publications