She Listened To Doctors About Which Vaccines To Get. Her School Kicked Her Out.

A 16-year-old girl is fighting back after she was kicked out of school for not getting a vaccine doctors say could harm her.

The girl and her mother filed a lawsuit against Oceanside School District in New York, alleging that the district is punishing her for acting on the advice of her doctors. Sarah Doe, a pseudonym that’s also used in her lawsuit, was barred from attending class after opting to skip the final two doses of the Hepatitis B vaccine on the advice of six doctors and a nurse practitioner, according to to the lawsuit. 

Sarah told The Daily Wire in an interview on her situation. She says she was a standout flag football player, but now she can’t play organized sport either.  She misses her friends and teammates and feels like part of her identity has been ripped from her. 

“I was known for flag football…and now it’s like, I’m like a nobody because I can’t be in school,” she said. 

Courtesy of Jane Doe family

Sarah’s medical problems started back in 2019, her mother Jane Doe, also a pseudonym, told The Daily Wire. That’s when New York repealed parents’ ability to obtain exemptions for certain vaccines required for students to attend school. Jane said it was a very difficult decision, but after homeschooling Sarah did not work for them, Sarah caught up on her vaccines. 

Over two months, Sarah received 18 vaccine doses. Jane said the overload of the vaccines sparked severe autoimmune conditions, kidney issues, debilitating migraines, continuous rashes, and a diagnosis of Von Willebrand’s disease, a bleeding disorder where blood does not clot properly. Sarah recalled becoming septic at the hospital. 

“It’s just her body responding to all those vaccines at once that just shut her down almost,” Jane said. “That’s where our life started with the doctors. We were like, all of a sudden the new norm was seeing doctors.”

Courtesy of Jane Doe family

Due to the health conditions, Sarah did not get the last dose of the Heppatitis B vaccine. She instead submitted to the school blood titers, a lab test that shows the concentration of specific antibodies. Last September, the school told Jane the test was negative and that Sarah must get the final dose of the vaccine. 

But given Sarah’s condition, several doctors told her she shouldn’t get the final dose. In October, Jane submitted three medical exemptions from three doctors. One after the other, the school denied them.

Notably, one of the physicians who refused to give Sarah the vaccination was completely unaware of the teen’s conditions. Sarah and her father tried to get Sarah the vaccination at CityMD without Jane’s consent, and did not inform the doctor of the teen’s issue. Still, Jane told The Daily Wire, the doctor noticed a rash on Sarah’s face and refused to administer the vaccine. Jane said she was able to get that doctor to write a medical exemption for Sarah, which the school denied.

The following month, Jane tried to have the school district physician at Oceanside examine her daughter to see the issue firsthand. The doctor refused to examine Sarah, and the name of the physician was withheld from the family, for reasons unknown to them. 

Jane said when you call neighboring school districts, they tell you the name of the district physician. “You call the nurse’s office and they tell you who the district physician is,” she said. 

On February 4, Sarah was officially barred from school. By the end of February, Jane had submitted seven medical exemptions, each of which was denied by Oceanside. 

Jane told The Daily Wire that she knew she was going to have to take legal action after the district denied the medical exemption from the CityMD doctor who wasn’t aware of Sarah’s medical history. “I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she said. 

Jane reached out to attorney Sujata Gibson and the family filed suit on April 14. 

Gibson told The Daily Wire that Oceanside and other school districts in New York are engaging in “flat-out discriminatory and dangerous” behavior by overriding medical doctors’ recommendations. 

“The problem really is these New York State Department of Health regulations that were issued in 2019, that led to hundreds of children who had longstanding medical exemptions suddenly getting them revoked,” Gibson explained. “Meaning many, many families have had to move out of town, get vaccinated against medical advice — some children have been severely harmed by that.”

Gibson said these districts are not acting lawfully, and highlighted legislation called the Education for All Act, which Sarah has personally advocated for. 

“This bill, called Education for All — what it would do is it would simply reiterate the state’s existing law and say school districts are not allowed to overrule treating physicians,” the attorney said. 

Currently, regulations are incorrectly being interrupted by school principals and superintendents “to overrule treating physicians about what is safe for the child,” Gibson added.

The Daily Wire reached out to Oceanside School District Superintendent Dr. Phyllis S. Harrington, but did not hear back. 

Courtesy of Jane Doe family

Gibson hopes the issue can be fixed through the pending legislation, but also acknowledged that action from the federal government might be necessary. 

“If the state won’t fix this, we are just hoping that the federal government will intervene,” she said. “There are a lot of things the federal government could do. This is a square violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.”

“Children with disabilities are required to be accommodated and allowed to attend school,” Gibson explained. “And what these school districts are doing is flat-out discriminatory and dangerous to their health.”

Underscoring her point, Gibson said, per New York state law, “if you have an active Hepatitis B infection – not just a lack of vaccination – the school cannot exclude you,” she said. “So, if Sarah had Hepatitis B, she would be allowed to go to school, but because she does not have Hepatitis B, and is only missing the third dose of the series, she is being excluded.” 

Gibson added that she’s “absolutely” optimistic about potential help from the federal government, since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

“Either HHS or President Donald Trump are empowered to withhold funding from these schools or from the Department of Health if they continue to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act,” she said. 

Asked if she has a final message to the district, Sarah said she feels like they don’t care about her. “They don’t care at all,” she said.