When 15-year-old Ellah Nahum and a few other unvaccinated students showed up at Los Angeles' New West Charter School on Tuesday, January 18, after winter break, they brought lunches, backpacks, and negative COVID-19 tests, hoping to be allowed in. They'd been negotiating with school administrators since early October, when the school had announced that a vaccine mandate would go into effect in January. Prior to returning to school from winter break, they'd requested a hearing, attempting to find alternative options to getting vaccinated.

When they showed up at school around 7:30 a.m., they sailed through the first checkpoint, run by two newly hired security guards who were satisfied with the girls' proof of negative test conducted in the last 24 hours. It was the second checkpoint, run by school administrators demanding proof of vaccination, that created trouble for the teens. Several hours later, after tense negotiations between administrators, teens, and their parents, the school called Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to the scene, and cordoned the teens off, denying them chairs and bathroom breaks, according to the girls.

Nahum tells Reason she's unvaccinated for several reasons. Given her Jewish faith, she has reservations about putting foreign substances in her body, like vaccines or birth control pills (though she's received all childhood vaccines required to enter school). She has concerns about the fact that most other vaccines go through many years of testing, whereas the COVID-19 vaccine has not. Some of her friends have had their menstrual cycles stop around the same time they got vaccinated or encountered other bizarre side effects. And, all that aside, she already contracted the virus back in December 2020.

"The big thing that's been going around is that I'm an anti-vaxxer, and that's not the case," she says. The school claims its student body is 96 percent vaccinated, but Nahum mentions that she's heard through the grapevine that some students have falsified their vaccination information, so that may be a slight overcount.