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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    341·
    10 months ago

    “My six-year-old needs to be protected from a deadly disease but I don’t trust vaccines. I know! I’ll call a midwife!”

    She is awful and deserves prison time, not just a fine, but the parents are also fucking stupid.

    • Snapz@lemmy.world
      142·
      10 months ago

      The importantance of vaccines are “I need to do my part to protect OTHER kids AND adults from deadly disease”

      That’s the biggest part of this problem though, it’s not “my six year old” on the table here - it’s everyone’s six year old. I have a responsibility to understand that.

      If we can’t understand the above, then we don’t live in a functioning society.

        • Texas_Hangover@lemm.ee
          310·
          10 months ago

          That sounds awfully similar to deaths from the flu every year, why didn’t everybody flip out and wrap their faces in panty liners before big scary covid came along and petrified the sheep? I’m old enough to remember all the terrifying “pandemics” that the media tried to scare everybody with every 5 or 12 years or so. Covid is the one that stuck.

          • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            10 months ago

            That sounds awfully similar to deaths from the flu every year,

            If it does, it’s only because you’re profoundly stupid. They aren’t the same. Millions died from Covid, 1.2million in the US alone - Stop acting like it’s just a few randos…

            scare everyone? Scare everyone into what? How fucking weak are you that wearing a mask is too much? what a child

            panty liner? jesus you really are a 5 year old.

          • Snapz@lemmy.world
            31·
            10 months ago

            Everyone knows you’re afraid when they read your impotent posturing here.

            You’re trying so hard to get your Darwin award, and because you’re still here, I guess we’ll just add this latest one to the long list of failures in your life. You probably don’t admit it to anyone except yourself when it’s dark at night, but you know, as strongly as you know anything, that when you leave a room people laugh at you - lightly at first and then they just stop as they become overwhelmed with pity for the shell of a person you are.

            Just yelling at the sky trying to prove you’re the bravest coward, and fooling nobody.

    • ANON
      91·
      10 months ago

      Removed by mod

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        I wouldn’t be surprised if her patient’s parents knew she was pencil whipping these vaccinations, otherwise she’d be in jail or being sued by the families.

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
        1·
        10 months ago

        Authorities never looked into whether or not the parents/guardians were aware of it, so they get off scott free here.

        Erin Clary, a health department spokesperson, said Thursday that while parents and legal guardians had sought out and paid Breen for her services, they weren’t the focus of the agency’s investigation.

  • Bone@lemmy.world
    336·
    10 months ago

    So much pain caused by this person. Forcing all the families to re-do everything. Stupid removed; should be sitting in jail.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      48·
      10 months ago

      Apparently the families came to her to try and get fake vaccines.

      • Bone@lemmy.world
        13·
        10 months ago

        Ah. Thank you for the additional information. It wasn’t clear from the headline and description, although I probably should have inferred that detail. As well, I did not read the article.

        • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
          151·
          10 months ago

          I didn’t make an assumption based on the headline, I made the assumption based on the statement at the end of the article, which I quoted in another comment.

          Erin Clary, a health department spokesperson, said Thursday that while parents and legal guardians had sought out and paid Breen for her services, they weren’t the focus of the agency’s investigation.

          It’s still maybe an assumption - perhaps there were people who thought they were getting real vaccines, not a homeopathic alternative - but it’s what the health department said.

          I’m guessing you read that other comment after making this one, as you’ve since replied to that comment thread. So no worries.

    • derf82@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      10 months ago

      The families are the ones that sought her out. No sympathy for them. She was helping anti-vaxxers skip the law who previously used a religious exemption.

      • Bone@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        I now understand that. Thank you also for pointing that out. Yeah, they all suck.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    27·
    10 months ago

    And jailtime? She actively and knowingly risked the lives of children FFS, not only the ones she gave crap, but also the ones around them.

    She should be jailed for a long time

    • TwinTusks@bitforged.spaceEnglish
      191·
      10 months ago

      They would feel like they are saving the children from the evil government that try to give dangerous drugs to kids.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
          10·
          10 months ago

          be the us government in the last 100 years and don’t … deliberately infect people with syphilis (Tuskagee), deliberately test lead paint on their children (JH-KKI), test chemical weapons on them (Whitecoat), enact compulsory sterilization (Buck v Bell), adding spinal taps to kids (Wentworth), replace prison inmates testicles with dead men’s/animal testicles (San Quentin), or give them malaria (Stateville) or spray them with pesticides until they get lupus, brain issues or their skin is forever damaged (Holmesberg) spray an entire US city (San Francisco) with pneumonia-inducing bacteria (Seaspray), give a school class hepetits (Willowbrook), try to give the entire state of Georgia malaria (Operation Big Buzz), hire sex workers to give out their services for free and then inject people with experimental drugs and LSD (Midnight Climax), deliberately put mental health patients into months-long medical-induced comas, then wake them into them wearing a blacked out helmet where they can’t see or hear but are played a loop saying “You are a good person” while physically restrained, being randomly electrocuted and fed a cocktail of drugs… for weeks or months without rest, causing the patients to end up completely incapable of normal human function afterwards (MKULTRA Sub-proj 68)…

          probably some of that eroded some trust among the general populace (not an anti vaxxer btw but wanted to add some context that some concerns aren’t totally unfounded)

          • Devorlon@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Because Anti-vaxxers don’t exist in other countries…

            It’s more that people are distrustful of large organisations in general (governments, business, religion). There’s a rightful suspicion of faceless entities, and I don’t think that can be “fixed”.

        • stoly@lemmy.world
          3·
          10 months ago

          They didn’t think that way when they got old, they always felt that way then got old.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
      21·
      10 months ago

      They are in it for the politics and religious belief. Really, this is “You’re not my mom and you can’t make me”, but spoken by adults.

        • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          totally, and generally is effective until you run into fuckwits like this lady. We had awesome, science-based midwives to help our delivery and it went great. Some states like WA license both at the state level and require other education / certs.

  • ExfilBravo@lemmy.world
    131·
    10 months ago

    Wait until she needs a doctor and then send her to a clown doctor instead. So she knows how it feels.

  • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    Isn’t that a crime?

    Edit:

    while parents and legal guardians had sought out and paid Breen for her services, they weren’t the focus of the agency’s investigation.

    Ok, that’s slightly different. I thought she was giving children fake vaccines without their knowledge. Still incredibly shitty, and it isn’t clear but it sounds like she’s still allowed to practice as a midwife, just not vaccinate people.

      • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
        110·
        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.

        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.

        • psud@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 months ago

          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

          • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            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.