20 Years of Impact: The Vaccine Exemption Doctor

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.

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