The California Medical Board has charged San Diego Dr. Tara Zandvliet with “gross and repeated negligence” for writing out almost one-third of the area’s vaccine medical exemptions. According to the Voice of San Diego, there were 486 medical exemptions from vaccinations for the entire San Diego Unified School District since June 2015.” According to Ars Technica, Dr. Zandvliet accounts for 141 of those medical exemptions.
The charging document states that Zandvliet, in an email correspondence with a father concerning his 4-year-old daughter, stated that she could provide a medical exemption if he could produce “4 or more people affected” by one of the auto-immune illnesses on her website. Her rationale for this was that a child with this family history might be more prone to having a bad reaction to vaccinations. The kinds of illnesses Zandvliet referred to on her website included asthma and psoriasis. Zandvliet reportedly took down those two illnesses from her website along with eczema after a newspaper reporter spoke with her earlier in 2019 about the high medical exemption rate.
The charging document also states that Dr. Zandvliet took meager written documentation from the father concerning medical conditions from his half brother, his grandmother, and a great uncle. According to the charge, she did no examination of the young girl other than "watching her play with the toys and doing the developmental, by watching her do that." Zandvliet reportedly at no time found out whether or not the 4-year-old girl had previously had any vaccinations (she had) and whether or not she had an adverse reaction to any given of them (she did not).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics do not recognize family autoimmune histories as a valid reason for vaccine exemption, in part because there is no evidence to recognize. Zandvliet told the Voice of San Diego in March that she believed research would catch up to her fact-free thinking.
Zandvliet charged $180 for the consultations and medical exemptions, and while she doesn’t accept insurance, she says that the cost was the same as her going rate to see patients. According to the charging document, Zendvliet says she has probably written around 1,000 exemptions during her time in practice.
Sacramento state Sen. Richard Pan, who is also a medical doctor and wrote the 2015 legislation prohibiting “personal belief” exemptions, told the Voice of San Diego that charging for exemptions is a strange bit of business. “In a normal practice, we don’t charge money for a medical exemption. If a child has a real reason that is acknowledged by the CDC for a medical exemption, then we just write it.”
Zandvliet has said that she thinks vaccines are important for public health and that she rejects far more people looking for exemptions than she writes them for. She also told the Voice that while she tries to recommend everyone get their vaccinations, “I can’t force them to do anything. But I can recommend it.” However, even her attempts to plead that she is pro-vaccination are telling. Zandvliet provided investigators a transcript of how she reassures groups of parents worrying about things like “aluminum” being in vaccines:
"The things in the vaccines are there for a reason - if any of you use colloidal silver as an antiviral/antibiotic, then you know why aluminum is in the vaccines. Something has to be in the vaccine to prevent bacteria from growing in it while it sits on the shelf. Remember the spinal injections in Florida that killed many people because they had a fungus growing in the steroidal solution? Well, how about injecting bacteria along with your vaccine. No thanks. If not aluminum, then neomycin antibiotic. You can't have nothing in it."
That’s not science. Aluminum and other adjuvants are used to get the body’s immune system to respond in the way that will protect the individual from whatever it is they are being vaccinated for. Then there is this bit of madness:
The group visit transcript also encourages parents to "follow [their] gut" in deciding on a vaccination schedule for each child, and to follow their children's "gut," too. She provides the example of her daughter who, when she was 12, told respondent that she was "going to get the flu this year and die," as she had "felt it in [her] bones." Respondent continued, "[t]hat's a pretty strong gut feeling. So I gave her the shot ... "
It will now be up to the California’s Medical Board to decide what will happen to the good doctor. The board has a wide range of authority in a case like this, ranging from written warnings to suspensions and even the loss of her medical license. Since this is not a criminal charge, Zandvliet can continue to practice medicine while the case is active.