On April 26, 2021, a private school in Miami, Florida emailed a letter to parents that singled out vaccinated staff, including teachers, according to news reports. Centner Academy, which opened in 2019 and reportedly “charges almost $30,000 a year per student,” said in the email that
one of its policies is to not employ anyone who has been vaccinated for COVID-19.
This was a true story. In fact, the Centner Academy website recently published an anti-vaccine news article on its website with the headline: “Medical Freedom from Mandated Vaccines.” The page contained false and misleading information about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
Jim DeFede, an investigative reporter with Miami’s CBS4, tweeted a copy of the letter that was sent to parents. The tweet was later removed, purportedly in violation of Twitter’s rules.
The beginning of the email pushed a false and debunked conspiracy theory that claimed vaccinated individuals are dangerous to people who are unvaccinated. The Florida school also said that it has a policy that it would not employ teachers or other staff if they had received a vaccine:
It was an eventful week that also included an important meeting among our faculty and staff where we shared the difficult decision that moving forward, until further notice, we ask any employee who has not yet taken the experimental COVID-19 injection, to wait until the end of the school year.... It is our policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has taken the experimental COVID-19 injection until further information is known.
The email was filled with false and debunked conspiracy theories. For example, it claimed that no “solid research” exists on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
