Michael Koss

A New York-licensed physician can sign a medical exemption for a child (assuming you can even find one properly educated on the topic and brave enough to withstand the inevitable attacks on their right to practice medicine lawfully and on their reputation)—and a school district or the State can still reject it and exclude the child from school, likely up to the entire school year until appeal is decided. New York’s published kindergarten medical-exemption rate is about 0.1%—one child in a thousand. CDC does not publish a single statewide 1–12 rate. Acceptance versus denial of physician-signed requests is not publicly reported. Appeal is a fool’s errand. Informed consent does not exist. In 2017–2020, Lois Lamerato, Ph.D., and colleagues at Henry Ford Health in Detroit compared about 18,500 insured children born 2000–2016: roughly 16,500 with at least one vaccine and about 2,000 with none. The unpublished Henry Ford analysis reported a ~2.5-fold higher hazard of a composite chronic condition in the vaccinated group, about 4.3 times the asthma hazard, about 3 times atopic disease, about 5–6 times autoimmune disease, elevated eczema, and about 5.5 times a bundled neurodevelopmental category, including higher developmental delay and speech disorder. Autism was present in 23 cases in the vaccinated group, 1 in the unvaccinated group. The draft did not find a statistically significant autism association. It recorded 262 ADHD diagnoses in the vaccinated group and zero in the unvaccinated group, and zeros for behavioral disability, learning and intellectual disability, tics, brain dysfunction, and diabetes. Modeled to 10 years, 43% of the vaccinated group was free of the composite chronic outcome versus 83% of the unvaccinated group. Draft study: documentcloud.org/documents/… The paper sat unpublished for five years. In September 2025 it hit a Senate hearing after Aaron Siri and ICAN obtained the draft. Siri testified that Lamerato did not want to “make doctors uncomfortable” and Zervos did not want to “lose his job.” Bigtree says Zervos told him publishing would end his career. Henry Ford says the draft failed scientific review and the groups were not comparable and the unvaccinated children were followed less and seen less. They are not peer-reviewed proof of causation. Reviewers treat the narrowly defined ACIP contraindications as the safe harbor. Asthma is not an ACIP contraindication for school-required vaccines. Neither is eczema. Neither is atopic disease. Neither is ADHD. Neither are tics, learning disability, intellectual disability, behavioral disability, speech disorder, or developmental delay. Tough for a parent to ignore these massive red flags showing in the Henry Ford draft, while those conditions are not on the list that can stop a shot. A doctor may simply state that “further vaccination is contraindicated”, only to be denied. Even if New York doesn’t think those conditions matter, the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is more inclusive. Respiratory disabilities such as asthma can substantially limit breathing. ADHD, learning disability, intellectual disability, speech disorder, developmental delay, tics, and other neurological conditions can substantially limit learning, concentrating, communicating, or neurological function. Diabetes and major autoimmune disease can do the same for endocrine and immune function. In June 2019, when the NY Legislature and Governor repealed the religious exemption, children who had been in school under a religious exemption were told to take the shots or leave. One of them later appeared in federal court as Sarah/Jane Doe of Oceanside. Filings say that after the repeal she received many of the previously exempted doses on a compressed schedule and later alleged serious reactions, including hypersensitivity, chronic rashes, and periodic paralysis. In 2025 the district still refused an exemption from the remaining hepatitis B dose, despite certifications from multiple New York–licensed physicians in support of her exemption. That case is not a footnote. It is what the New York process looks like when a real child goes through it. Find a doctor willing to write the exemption. Get denied. Appeal to the Commissioner of Education. Be prepared to sit out an entire school year, and be denied again. Then look at what “protection” the law actually offers if the shot goes wrong. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 largely shields manufacturers of covered childhood vaccines. For those shots, the ordinary courtroom is closed first. The main path to money is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)—a special court in the Court of Federal Claims, not a jury, not the company that made the product. Even there, the easy cases are the ones that match the Vaccine Injury Table: a listed injury, from a listed vaccine, inside a listed time window. Off-table injuries—the ones families actually show up with, the chronic and neurological wreckage that does not come pre-printed on the federal list—do not get that presumption. You litigate causation in a system built to move slowly, with damages rules that will never buy back a childhood. VICP is not a school desk and not a safety system. It is a claim you file after the child is already injured—or gone. No parent should have to “rely on VICP.” By then the harm has already happened. In August 2025, Judge Gary R. Brown granted a preliminary injunction and let Jane return for the year. He applied the high bar those orders require and pointed to the ADA duty to accommodate a disabled child. Albany told other districts the order is not statewide law. On August 10, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14420, “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans.” The order does three things that matter in Albany this month: It tells states to review school-entry immunization laws against the Administration’s “gold standard” schedule and peer-country practice—not to treat the old CDC/ACIP list as untouchable scripture. It directs every federal agency to advance those recommendations to the fullest extent of law. It instructs the Attorney General, and the Departments of Justice, Education, and HHS, to act against state systems that collide with parental authority, religious liberty, disability accommodations, and equal protection—including, where federal law applies, the duty to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements. Grantees and contractors, including states taking federal education and immunization money, are on notice. EO 14420 tells federal agencies to treat those issues as enforcement priorities where federal law applies. The Oceanside child already had an ADA theory a federal judge took seriously. Families whose charts show asthma, ADHD, learning or speech disability, tics, autoimmune disease, or diabetes are in that same legal category: ACIP will not treat those conditions as a stop-sign, while the ADA may already cover the child. Parents in New York are opening 2026–27 denial letters now. Many districts will move to exclude shortly after the school year starts if the child is not in compliance or in a recognized exemption. Families opening denial letters now are on the coercive ticking clock. If that order means anything, say so to Albany before children are pulled from school. @POTUS @SecKennedy @HHSGov @usedgov @TheJusticeDept @AaronSiriSG @delbigtree @ChildrensHD @SenRonJohnson @ChadDavenport10 @teacher_choice @NassauExec