Vaccine skeptic pediatrician is charged with gross negligence

A pediatrician who has linked vaccines to autism and written a bestselling parents’ guide that proposes an “alternative” vaccine schedule faces potential loss of his license over his care of a patient.

Robert Sears wrote a doctors’ letter for a 2 year old boy recommending “no more routine childhood vaccines for the duration of his childhood.” But the Medical Board of California said that he had not properly examined the child and gave no clinical evidence or explanation to justify the exemption.

Sears is also charged with failing to carry out a neurological examination when the boy later presented complaining of headaches, after being hit on the head with a hammer by his father.

Sears’s notes from the April 2014 consultation record the history that he took from the boy’s …