The Medical Board of California has accused a San Diego doctor of “gross negligence” for granting at least one vaccination exemption based on “remote and irrelevant family history,” and for other conduct associated with writing an estimated 1,000 such exemptions since 2016.

In a 10-page accusation document released Monday and dated Oct. 1, Kimberly Kirchmeyer, the medical board’s executive director, requests suspension or revocation of the medical license granted to Dr. Tara Zandvliet, whose South Park practice became popular in recent years as a new law that banned “personal belief” vaccination exemptions took effect.

Zandvliet did not respond Tuesday afternoon to a request for comment on the matter, though she will have an opportunity to defend herself in an administrative hearing before any final decision is made.

When the state Legislature voted to rein in personal belief exemptions following a multi-state measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in late 2014, it granted broad autonomy for doctors to exempt children from school vaccination requirements if, in their judgment, there were valid medical reasons why following the vaccine schedule could be harmful.


The complaint against Zandvliet zeroes in on a single girl, now age 7, to whom the medical board says Zandvliet, granted an unjustified medical exemption on July 26, 2016.

According to the accusation, Zandvliet decided there was enough medical evidence to warrant an exemption because the patient had a “slightly increased” risk of adverse reaction to common childhood vaccines due to a family history of bad reactions.

That history, the document states, included:

Her paternal great grandmother, then 85, who said in a letter that she suffered from asthma from age 25 through 45 and from psoriasis since age 60;

Her father’s half-brother, who said in a letter that he suffered from asthma from age 5 through age 18;

Her great uncle, who provided a one-page medical record stating that he suffered from psoriasis and dermatitis;

Her paternal grandmother, who said in a letter that she had asthma from age 3 through 23 and had a bad reaction to a rabies shot 58 years earlier when she was 3 years old.

Though Zandvliet, the medical board states, found these four histories to be evidence that the girl has a “family history of hyper-immune conditions like asthma, autoimmune disease and vaccine reactions” that put her at “high risk of a severe reaction to vaccines,” the overseeing body finds the evidence thin, noting that the child had actually received several vaccines earlier in life with not adverse reactions.


The board also accuses the doctor of failing to examine the patient thoroughly and of failing to properly maintain the patient’s medical records, stating that her examination involved “watching her play with the toys” at the office but not conducting a physical examination.

Zandvliet has been among a handful of doctors statewide who have faced scrutiny for the large numbers of medical vaccination exemptions they have written since personal exemptions went away for the first time during the 2016-2017 school year. In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune in August 2016, the physician, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University before earning a medical doctorate from New York Medical College, was open about the fact that she considered family history to be a significant and valid reason why a child shouldn’t be vaccinated.

“There are situations I have seen where every single kid in the family has a severe reaction to a vaccine, not life-threatening, but very scary, and they’ve got 13 family members with multiple sclerosis,” Zandvliet said in the 2016 interview. “What I know about the immune system, that kid’s not going to react the same way my kids did to a shot.”

Heredity of an immune response is a hotly-debated topic that is not fully understood, though family history tends to be taken more seriously among close relatives who have very severe and well-documented reactions that involve immediate and potentially life-threatening symptoms.


Many whose children have experienced a wide range of medical problems following routine vaccination have said this interpretation is too narrow and have expressed concerns that a narrow view of which reactions are valid and which aren’t put their kids at risk. But the public health community has countered firmly that the evidence of hereditary immune response is thin.

The medical board’s accusation comes amid significant change at the state level with Gov. Gavin Newsom signing SB-276 on Sept. 9. The law, which takes effect in 2021, calls for stricter state oversight of medical exemptions granted by all California doctors.

In hearings before the Legislature, many parents said the new law would make physicians much more reluctant to sign off on exemptions because they would do so under penalty of perjury.