Bizarro World: Anti-Vaxx School Tells Vaccinated Students to Quarantine for 30 Days
One Miami private school is so far off the anti-vaxx deep end it’s forcing students who get vaccinated to stay home for 30 days following each dose.
Yes, you read that correctly. Vaccinated students will have to miss a month of school at Centner Academy over unfounded fears that vaccines are potentially harmful to people around the vaccinated person. According to WSVN, the school’s chief operating officer sent a letter to parents of students last week that said: “If you are considering the vaccine for your Centner Academy student(s), we ask that you hold off until the summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease.”
It’s a strange claim because there is no scientific evidence showing that vaccinated people transmit or shed anything onto others. In fact, it’s the opposite. Getting vaccinated reduces the chances that a person will transmit or shed the virus and infect other people, the CDC has found.
“There is no way for a COVID-19 vaccinated person to ‘shed vaccine,'” the CDC told Reuters in April.
Not ones to let science get in their way, Centner has created quarantine requirements for students who receive the vaccine. “Because of the potential impact on other students and our school community, vaccinated students will need to stay at home for 30 days post-vaccination for each dose and booster they receive and may return to school after 30 days as long as the student is healthy and symptom-free,” the letter read.
David Centner, the “tech visionary” who co-founded the school, defended the policy in a statement provided to Rolling Stone. “Centner Academy’s policy was enacted as a prudent precautionary measure after much thoughtful deliberation,” he wrote, adding that though the school “does not believe that one who is vaccinated can infect another person with COVID” it must “err on the side of caution when making decisions that may impact the health of the school community.” He cited “voluminous anecdotal reports” about vaccinated people negatively impacting others.
Centner Academy made news in April when it made a similarly dumbfounding decision to ban teachers who are vaccinated for Covid-19 from working with students. “We cannot allow recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known,” Leila Centner, who co-founded the school, wrote in a letter to the school’s employees.
According to reporting by The New York Times, Centner has been a frequent sharer of vaccine misinformation on Facebook and WhatsApp.
The school is so anti-vaxx, it even has a page on its website dedicated to vaccine misinformation, bragging that any parent can fill out a medical or religious exemption form. “There is a large belief in the United States that the excess of mandatory vaccines is actually damaging” children’s immune systems, the school states without citing evidence.
At least one parent withdrew their child from the school because of its anti-vaxx attitudes. Iris Acosta-Zobel, whose seven-year-old daughter once attended Centner, told Miami’s Local 10 News that she withdrew her child in May because of the vaccine misinformation, saying, “That’s not a true educational environment.”