Long Island teen kicked out of class after judge tosses vaccine exemption signed by doc on state fraud list

A Long Island teen has been kicked out of class after a judge tossed her vaccine exemption that was signed by a suspected fraudulent doctor who never even examined her. The 17-year-old girl, a senior at Oceanside High School, will be barred from campus starting Thursday after losing her bid to force the district to give her an exemption from the hepatitis B and meningitis shots required by the state for 12th graders, according to court documents. “School officials were well within their rights to request further supporting documentation,” Eastern District Judge Gary Brown wrote in Wednesday’s ruling. The teen’s mom, only listed in court records as Jane Doe, sued the district in April 2025 after it refused to exempt her daughter from the final shot of the three-dose hepatitis B series and the second dose of the meningococcal vaccine, which protects against meningitis. Her daughter, who appears as Sarah Doe, had previously been exempt from needing vaccines to attend public school for religious reasons until 2019, when New York lawmakers eliminated the exemption in the wake of a measles outbreak. In order to stay in school after the exemption ended, Sarah Doe took 18 doses of vaccines over just six weeks, leading to what her mom claimed were “repeated serious medical crises,” according to court documents. The mother had been previously granted a court order last year that let her daughter attend her junior year without the final hepatitis B shot after a doctor noted that she had an anaphylactic reaction, court papers said. But this year’s exemption request also included the meningococcal vaccine, and was this time signed off by Dr.Carlos Rivera, who appears on the state’s Vaccine Fraud Awareness list and testified he had never examined or even spoken to the teen before filing it, court documents read. The school’s doctor, Dr.

Antwan Haskoor, repeatedly asked for more information backing up the request, including “a specific reason why Sarah...