FL School Says Vaxxed Students Must Stay Home For 30 Days After Shot

In the spring, the school barred vaxxed teachers from interacting with students

As public health officials fight COVID-19 misinformation, their task seems to get harder and harder with each passing week. And so it was recently, when a school in Miami sent a letter to parents: if you vaccinate your child, they’ll have to stay home for 30 days after each shot.

The communication came from Centner Academy and repeated false claims that vaxxed people could pass on the so-called harmful effects of the shot to unvaccinated students and staff.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long debunked claims that the coronavirus vaccine can “shed or release any of their components” through air or skin contact. For starters, the coronavirus vaccines do not contain (and have never contained) a live virus, so there is nothing of the live virus to transmit.

David Centner, one of the school’s co-founders, doubled down on the fake claims in a statement to The Washington Post, claiming the policy was put in place due to “numerous anecdotal cases that have been in circulation.”

“The school is not opining as to whether unexplained phenomena have a basis in fact, however we prefer to err on the side of caution when making decisions that impact the health of the school community,” Centner said.

Despite the Food and Drug Administration’s evidence that coronavirus vaccines are safe and highly effective, vaccine misinformation online has been a top hurdle for the White House and public health experts when persuading people to get the shots. Almost 219 million Americans have received at least one vaccine dose, which is about 66 percent of the eligible population, according to The Post’s vaccination tracker.

The Post reports tuition for the Centner Academy ranges from $15,000 to $30,000 per year. The school welcomes anti-vaccine parents because it does not require any immunizations for enrollment, declaring a parent’s “freedom of choice” and repeating the false claim that there are “unknown risks associated with vaccinations” that could hurt children.

A similar sentiment was shared in an email to parents last week regarding the covid vaccine. School leadership referred to the jabs in the communication as “experimental,” and encouraged parents thinking about vaxxing their child to wait at least until the school year ends.

“We ask that you hold off until the summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease,” Centner Academy leaders wrote.

Previously, a teacher told students they should not hug their vaxxed parents for more than five seconds. Some parents threatened to pull their children out of school over the comments.

In his statement to The Post, David Centner said the school’s policies are made as a “prudent precautionary measure.”

“Our top priorities have always been our students’ well-being and their sense of safety within our educational environment,” he said.