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.
Placebo is a real peer-reviewed thing and a powerful tool in the right hands. But it has to be authorized and prescribed by a real doctor who knows what they're doing...
At its roots, it's like PETA--originally started out by nice people who wanted people to be nice to animals. Over time, the whackadoos took over and now they are a hateful org.
Homeopathy had its origins in treating the whole person and not just the disease, but was quickly taken over by quacks and placebo salespeople.
Homeopathy had its origins in treating the whole person and not just the disease
That’s actually holistic medicine, not homeopathy. Homeopathy was invented in the late 1700s as an evolution of the medieval belief in humours.
Homeopathy’s premise is that ‘like cures like’ (a substance that causes symptoms in healthy people can cure them in sick people), coupled with a belief that water has a spiritual memory that can be unlocked by ritually diluting and shaking until no molecules of the active ingredient remain. Common dilutions are 1:10^60 or higher.
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.
beginning to suspect this is right.... still wearing my mask in crowded spaces, still watching 1000s die weekly from covid, no one seems to fucking care.... 1712 died last week.
Yeah she should get prison and they should follow up with the kids who is unvaccinated because of her and see if they are suffering from anything due to lack of vaccine and increase the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I looked it up and while it doesn't have a specific number of credits to be a licensed midwife in the state of New York, they do require you complete a Midwifery Course and require at least some Nutrition and Pharmacology credits as well as a comprehensive examination. The lowest number of credits I could find for Midwifery was 88 which is a lot less than an average bachelor's degree, but some higher level courses required RN status to complete. It appears the term is synonymous with Nurse in a lot of contexts so at first I thought it might be a difference in dialect, but upon closer inspection many midwife organizations appear holistic in nature, as in "spiritualism."
I really hate people who actively harm others based on their spiritual beliefs. The world would be better if she spent her life in prison, not just fined.
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.
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 think you misread what's happening. The parents actively sought her out for this service and Covid wasn't part of the "immunization" scheme she offered.