A New York midwife who gave nearly 1,500 children homeopathic pellets instead of required vaccinations has been fined $300,000.

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.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Deceptichum@kbin.social
        0·
        10 months ago

        Yes they were.

        Before they make have taken more precautions, afterwards they may have reduced them due to believing to be vaccinated.

        • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Before they make have taken more precautions

          I think the kind of people who would take homeopathic “vaccines” aren’t the kind of people who would have taken precautions anyway, not unless forced to. You could maybe argue that they were endangering children by sending them to school, but really the danger would have been with the non-vaccinated child.

          The only really significant new risk would be if a non-vaccinated homeopathic child was around a child who legitimately could not be vaccinated, but that’s dependent on specific circumstances.