By Dominic Taylor-
A private school in the Design District of Miami sent its faculty and staff a letter last week, ordering vaccinated staff not to return to school after summer, in order to avoid contact with students.
One of the co-founders of the school, Leila Centner, informed employees “with a very heavy heart” that if they chose to get a shot, they would have to stay away from students.
Ms. Centner, an avid promoter of anti-vaccine posts on Facebook, told staff they must stay away from pupils unless the pupils are vaccinated. The letter stated that “reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated.”
“Even among our own population, we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person,” she wrote, repeating a false claim that vaccinated people can somehow pass the vaccine to others and thereby affect their reproductive systems. (They can do neither.)
According to the letter, teachers who get the vaccine over the summer will not be allowed to return until clinical trials on the vaccine are completed. Even then, teachers would only be allowed to return “if a position is still available at that time” .
Ms. Centner said the faculty and staff will have to fill out a “confidential” form revealing whether they had received a vaccine — and if so, which one and how many doses — or planned to get vaccinated. The form requires employees to “acknowledge the School will take legal measures needed to protect the students if it is determined that I have not answered these questions accurately.”
The statement repeated erroneous claims that vaccinated people “may be transmitting something from their bodies” leading to adverse reproductive issues among women.
“We are not 100 percent sure the Covid injections are safe and there are too many unknown variables for us to feel comfortable at this current time,” the statement said.
The Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and many other authorities have concluded that the coronavirus vaccines now in emergency use in the United States are safe and effective. intelligence.
The school which opened in 2019 prominently advertises on its website support for “medical freedom from mandated vaccines.”
The Center has shared various anti-vaxx conspiracy theories on social media that claim that non-vaccinated people can be ‘negatively impacted’ by being around those who have been vaccinated. In her letter to staff, Centner claimed that she knew of ‘at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person’, promoting a debunked myth that the vaccine can pose a risk to women’s reproductive health.
Ms. Centner founded the school with her husband, David Centner, a technology and electronic highway tolling entrepreneur. Each has donated heavily to the Republican Party and the Trump re-election campaign, while giving much smaller sums to local Democrats.
In February, special guest and prominent antivaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was welcomed to speak to students. Mr. Kennedy was suspended from Instagram a few days later for promoting Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.) This month, the school hosted a Zoom talk with Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a New York pediatrician frequently cited by anti-vaccination activists.
The school’s website promotes its support for ‘medical freedom from mandated vaccines’, and has urged parents to push back against plans to vaccinate children ahead of the new school year, saying, ‘The amount of unknown risks associated with vaccinations will have you seriously second-guessing whether this policy should be upheld.’