SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A candidate for a seat on a Sacramento school board aired vaccine misinformation and criticized state policies related to race and sex education at public meetings over the past year, videos show.
Monique Hokman, who publicly stated at a school board meeting in April 2022 that the polio vaccine could be replaced by ultraviolet light, is running for a seat on the Natomas Unified School District Board of Trustees.
Asked last week about how UV light could help a person who has already contracted polio, Hokman said, “I’m not a medical professional.”
Hokman’s views on vaccines have yet to be broadcast in the run-up to the Nov. 8 election. She has emphasized her commitment to “parental rights” on her website and in at least one public appearance, a term adopted by critics of masking and vaccine policies.
She’s also backed by a local conservative group called Natomas USD for Freedom, which has lobbied against COVID protections.
This year will be the first time voters will choose Natomas trustees based on geographic districts instead of an at-large race.
Hokman is running for Area 4, which comprises neighborhoods north of Del Paso Road and east of Interstate 5, against education policy adviser Cindy Quiralte.
Quiralte is backed by the Natomas chapter of the California Teachers’ Association as well as two longtime Natomas school trustees, Susan Heredia and Lisa Kaplan. Quiralte declined to comment on Hokman’s statements at school board meetings.
Hokman has been endorsed by the Sacramento Police Officers Association and Lance Christensen, a Republican running a long-shot campaign for state superintendent of public instruction.
Although Hokman hasn’t put her beliefs front-and-center in this race, The Sacramento Bee reviewed footage of Natomas Board of Trustees meetings where she spoke into the public record in September 2021 and April 2022.
What Natomas candidate said at meeting
At an April 6 school board meeting, Hockman cherry-picked information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay the risks of various illnesses as she urged the board to oppose vaccine mandates.
She also alluded to the myth that vaccines cause autism. High-quality studies have shown repeatedly that they do not.
She said, “I have put together various articles and information directly from the CDC website for you to look through, and this is what I found: Treatment for measles is vitamin A. Pertussis can be treated with antibiotics. The polio virus is rapidly inactivated by heat and ultraviolet light. Rubella can be managed with bed rest and medicines for fever. Antibiotics for diphtheria. (For) rotavirus, (the) recommendation is to drink plenty of liquids. Mumps? Most people recover within two weeks.
“Some of the ingredients in the vaccines are aluminum, formaldehyde and fetal bovine syndrome, or serum,” she continued. “Why are you forcing us to inject our children with formaldehyde, with things that can be treated with Vitamin A and antibiotics?”
A UC Davis public health communications professor, Jingwen Zhang, said Hokman’s suggestions for each vaccine substitute ignored the danger of these illnesses.
For example, the CDC reports that in 1921, just before the vaccine debuted, diphtheria killed 15,520 people, many of them babies and children. Even with modern treatment, the CDC says that “about 1 in 10 patients with respiratory diphtheria die.” As for polio, the CDC says “there is no cure, but there are safe and effective vaccines.”
The Food and Drug Administration reports that some vaccines do contain formaldehyde and aluminum, as Hokman said, but not in amounts that are harmful to people. And while fetal bovine serum is sometimes used in vaccine production, it is not in vaccines themselves.
Zhang, the UC Davis professor, said that listing vaccine ingredients without relevant context is a textbook anti-vaccine strategy.
“Those very heavy words may appear to be very threatening. So without enough information, that can easily raise fear and anger and anxiety,” she said. “And those emotions are also a very easy tactic to get people on this spectrum of being very skeptical.”
At the meeting in April, Hokman gestured to the disproven link between autism and vaccines: “In 2000, the autism rates according to the CDC were 1 in 150. In 2018, they’re one in 44. According to this growth rate, by 2032 it’s expected that 80% of boys will be somewhere on the autism spectrum.”
Zhang pointed out that “mistaking the correlation with causation, right? That’s a very common type of mistake in logical argument, or a fallacy in the argument.”
In a phone interview, Hokman denied believing that vaccines lead to autism and said only that “we need to pay attention to the rising autism rates.”
Wanted more California vaccine exemptions
The Natomas election follows a politically divisive moment in the neighborhood. Last year, a conservative group known for undercover sting operations published a video of a teacher pledging his allegiance to antifa and saying he aspired to turn his students into “revolutionaries.”
The teacher resigned after a district investigation showed he had created his own curriculum and made some students feel uncomfortable with his discussions of politics.
One of the public meetings where Hokman addressed the school board came just after the group, Project Veritas, released its report on the Natomas teacher.
At that meeting, Hokman and other residents focused on disciplining the left-wing teacher. Hokman refused to wear a mask although a board member asked speakers to do so; at times, she was almost shouting.
“Hello, I’m Monique Hokman,” she said. “We have been quiet for too long about you trying to take our rights away as parents. We were silent when you took away our medical and religious exemptions away for vaccinations, and when they became mandatory for our kids to attend school.”
When asked about her position on vaccines in a phone interview, she contradicted her earlier statement and said she supports “a limited medical exemption.” California currently allows limited medical exemptions for vaccines.
At the meeting, she continued, “We were silent when you mandated these masks on our children, when the (California Department of Public Health) and Cal-OSHA knows that at maximum they’re worth 10% effective.”
According to a study sponsored by the California Department of Public Health, Californians who wear an N95 mask or equivalent in indoor public settings have 83% lower odds of testing positive for COVID.
At the meeting, Hokman went on to criticize the way race is handled in school.
“Race is being taught,” Hokman said. “The first day of school that my daughter goes, her teacher tells her that white is the worst race there is. They tell her that you cannot be racist against white people. This is just too much.”
She also invoked LGBT issues and sex ed: “We were silent, and some unaware, when you began mentioning sexual preferences in kindergarten. We have been silent when you began teaching explicit sexual education in eighth grade and not giving us this information ahead of time.”
California requires that public schools provide comprehensive sexual education at least once in middle school and once in high school. Parents are allowed to opt their children out of these classes. Hokman told The Bee she felt the curriculum was not fully explained to parents in advance, and that had she known more, she might have opted her own children out.
Hokman declined to elaborate on what she meant by “sexual preferences” in an interview.
Annamarie Smith, communications director for the Stonewall Democrats of Greater Sacramento, said Hokman was clearly invoking age-appropriate classroom materials that depict LGBT people. Smith said, “That’s just outrageous, the distortion.”
