In 2019, Dr. Tara Zandvliet had carved out an exceptional niche practicing medicine. She was the vaccine doctor of choice for a majority of parents in San Diego Unified School District, which has more than 100,000 students.
Zandvliet had written nearly a third of all vaccine exemptions for the entire district, according to a list I obtained. Not only that, she wrote many for dubious reasons, according to mainstream medical science.
Even before the Covid pandemic, vaccines were a lightning rod. The story travelled fast. Local, national and even international news outlets followed up on our story.
In honor of Voice of San Diego’s 20th anniversary, we’re looking back at the stories we broke that had a tremendous impact on San Diego. Read more here.
At the time, Zandvliet told me she wasn’t against vaccines. But she believed most doctors were too rigid in pushing the vast majority of kids to receive the full vaccine schedule.
“Everyone looks at me like I’m the evil one,” she said. “I’ve had death threats, people just think they know better.”
In particular, Zandvliet focused on family medical histories as a reason to write exemptions. She wrote many exemptions for children with a family history of allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Mark Sawyer, an infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital, told me there was zero proof that a family history of those conditions contributes to vaccine injuries.
Zandvliet said she knew that, but believed the science would catch up with her one day.
Zandvliet changed her website just before my story published. She removed family histories of eczema, psoriasis and asthma from her list of qualifying conditions.
“I have found that a few of the diseases on my list seem to invite misinterpretation more than others, and so I have deleted them,” she wrote in an email.
Fallout from the story went on for years.
Over the next several months, former state lawmakers Richard Pan and Lorena Gonzalez pushed a bill that would make it harder for, as they said, “unscrupulous” doctors to write bogus exemptions. Both cited Zandvliet’s case and Voice of San Diego’s reporting frequently. The new law allowed public health officials to review and potentially overturn vaccine exemptions in certain cases: if a doctor wrote more than five in a calendar year or if a school had a less than 95 percent vaccination rate.
The Medical Board of California also began investigating dozens of doctors after we published the initial list. (The initial list, included doctors’ names and the reason they granted an exemption, but not student information.) Medical Board investigators subpoenaed records for 31 doctors from San Diego Unified. Most of those doctors had, like Zandvliet, written exemptions based on family history of allergy and autoimmune disease.
Zandvliet herself was charged with writing multiple bogus vaccine exemptions. She is on probation with the Medical Board and not currently allowed to write vaccine exemptions.
Many other charges followed. As of 2022, 17 out of 27 physicians who had been charged with improper vaccine exemptions across the state appeared on Voice’s list.
At the time in 2022, two doctors from Voice’s list had surrendered their licenses, two more had their licenses revoked and six had been placed on probation.
Since that last story in 2022 more consequences have followed. Drs. James Novak and Jessica Peatross surrendered their licenses. Dr. John Humiston was publicly reprimanded. And Drs. Seth Camhi, Richard Chen, Timothy Dooley and Dan Harper were placed on probation and are currently not allowed to write vaccine exemptions.
I know Dr. Zandvliet and she is a fine, caring doctor, exceptionally so. Whether or not particular vaccine exemptions she provided were justified, i can’t judge. But mainstream medicine has been let off the hook despite a deteriorating quality of care and lack of quality research to allow significant progress on the major health conditions of our time. No one is doing anything to rein in the profiteering of insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry that have resulted in this poorer care, with no time to spend with or listen to patients and protocols that ignore that people are not all the same, we have different sensitivities and reactions to drugs and treatments.
Meanwhile, any minority views or alternative doctors, anyone with different ideas that may be worthy of further research, are being driven out of business.
If it wasn’t for alternative doctors, my Lyme Disease, dismissed as being in my head by mainstream practitioners, though I was so ill that I couldn’t get out of bed, would never been treated. I would have been unable to work and probably dead by now. However, because of a four year delay in diagnosis because of the dismissal of mainstream medicine, I still have lingering symptoms.
I am a big believer in vaccines but I got very ill TWICE after the Covid vaccine, with unexplained high fevers that lasted each time for over a month. Is anyone demanding better, safer, (and in the case of Covid and the flu vaccines that don’t prevent you from getting ill) more effective vaccines? Why not?
Push our poisons or else we will revoke your license. Sounds about right.
Will, This story is not balanced. It doesn’t ask any questions. For example, why so many vaccinations? Why at the times designated? Why are public schools in California no longer for all children (if children have had adverse reactions, and their parents want to wait, they are exiled from all schools and daycares)? Is the job of public schools to educate or to enforce medical procedures, feed everyone and provide them all psychological care? How do vaccinated children fare compared to those with natural immunity? Why are doctors punished if they disagree with the establishment? If all doctors are scared into submission, who will speak up for the patients? If vaccines do no harm to any children, why do pharmaceutical companies need the protection of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (1986) which protects companies from civil lawsuits when their vaccines harm children? Oh the list could go on. Or are we not allowed to challenge and ask questions?