A New York midwife who gave nearly 1,500 children homeopathic pellets instead of required vaccinations has been fined $300,000, the state’s health department announced this week.
Jeanette Breen, who operates Baldwin Midwifery on Long Island, administered the pellets as an alternative to vaccinations and then falsified their immunization records, the agency said Wednesday.
The scheme, which goes back least to the 2019-2020 school year, involved families throughout the state, but the majority reside on suburban Long Island. In 2019, New York ended a religious exemption to vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.
The health department said immunization records of the children who received the falsified records have been voided, and their families must now prove the students are up-to-date with their required shots or at least in the process of getting them before they can return to school.
Were the kids in any more danger than before they had the vaccine? I don’t think so. Obviously they’re in more danger than if they’d got the vaccine, and they were required to get the vaccines to attend schools, but that’s slightly different. I guess you could argue that the non-vaccinated children were endangering the lives of other children in the school, but really the biggest danger is to the non-vaccinated child.
If there was no deception to the parents, then the biggest crime is falsifying records, which is what she was convicted of.
My bigger issue is that she is still allowed to practice midwifery/nursing, it seems, and her restrictions only prohibit her from administering vaccines (which she wasn’t doing) or accessing the vaccine record database. She might be an old hag at the tail end of her career, but the fact that she managed to pay $150,000 suggests that she doesn’t desperately need to continue working, and given her offense she shouldn’t.
Edit: Apparently she operates (and probably owns) the midwifery clinic. No doubt she has money, apparently enough to pay for a good lawyer. She should have got worse.
I wasn’t able to have my measles vaccine as a baby because I had a fever — from a measles infection
If I had been exposed to measles a month later, I would have been fine, by getting the illness unvaccinated I was at much greater risk. Luckily I suffered no lasting damage.
Every day a child goes without vaccination is a risk
Yes but these parents wouldn’t have got the measles vaccine either way. We’re talking about the increase in risk caused by the person selling fake vaccines, to people who knew they were fakes.
If they didn’t get the fake vaccine at all, they still probably wouldn’t have got a vaccine. Their kid might not have gone to school, so that would be a slightly lower risk, but they would still be unvaccinated and if they did catch it their illness would have been just as severe.