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.
Homeopathy should be outlawed. Pseudoscience masquerading as healthcare.
There is placebo effect as well, so it might somehow help. But not the way they think and it shouldn’t be a substitute for proper medicine.
Not for babies, it won’t
It could to some degree through parents, but most probably not, indeed.
I do think that you’re right here. Parents could give a placebo to a child without realizing that it is a placebo, calm down, causing the child to calm down. Children are like dogs and stare directly at the faces of the adults around them to know how they should react to a situation. A calm parent can make a calm child.
Actually, it does. A friend of mine uses homeopathic anal suppositories for his almost 1 y/o and it almost always calms her down.
Guess having stuff shoved up your butt doesn’t need natural language to be understood lol.
Probably more like “I better shut up, or mom will shove more stuff up my butt.”
You forgot the most important rule of humanity: everything is normal to a child. That child thinks that all kids get pills shoved up their asses every night and doesn’t think anything of it.
That’s child abuse. But it’s also an example of how strong beliefs in homeopathy can arise. With fluctuating conditions, people often seek a solution when symptoms (or the child’s cries) are at their worst. When they get better soon after, it creates an illusion of effectiveness.
A similar illusion is at work with the MMR vaccine. Autism becomes diagnosable at around the same age as the first shot is given, creating a powerful impression that the two events are connected.
It’s why we have randomised controlled trials. With no control arm for comparison, your friend has concluded that abusing their child is somehow useful.
I myself am note sure whether they are any useful or effective, to each of their own. It’s not like I can talk him out of it. I wouldn’t spend a dime on any homeopathic at all.
The placebo effect isn’t stopping measles or polio.
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.
Here’s a great write-up on what it is and how it began from the National Library of Medicine.
It’s commonly mistaken for holistic medicine, but it’s a very different (and potentially dangerous) thing.
Thank you.
Homeopathy was developed and thriving in an era when “do nothing” was better for the patient than contemporary accepted treatments.
Wow, she avoided jail time!
Didn’t even lose her license from what it reads like. That’s crazy. These kinds of people are dangerous.
I swear in the last story it said she lost her license. Still not good enough but yeah.
That really sucks
“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.
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.
Unfortunately at this point we actually don’t live in a functioning society.
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I suspect that she selected her midwifery clients based on their views about vaccines.
Yeah, if the parents knew what was going on then they should lose custody
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.
So much pain caused by this person. Forcing all the families to re-do everything. Stupid bitch; should be sitting in jail.
Apparently the families came to her to try and get fake vaccines.
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.
Another comment assuming stuff from the headline alone.
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.
I agreed with you regarding the comment you replied to.
Thanks. I didn’t downvote you, you have my respect.
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 now understand that. Thank you also for pointing that out. Yeah, they all suck.
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
knowingly
You think she knew real stuff?
No jail time? That’s disappointing.
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She paid $150k and promised not to deal with medication anymore.
Only $200 per incidence? That doesn’t seem very steep for giving with peoples’ lives
Big money. Like it should be way more than that Scoob.
Why is she not in prison for life?
I’ll say the same thing I just said in another post.
What a trash bag of a human being.
I’m amazed that vaccines are part of a midwife’s role.
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.
Thanks for the research.
Isn’t that a crime?
Endangering childrens’ lives? Yes, I think…
I think it only counts if it happens before they are born /s
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.
Yes they were.
Before they make have taken more precautions, afterwards they may have reduced them due to believing to be vaccinated.
The parents went to her specifically for fake vaccines and falsified records.
Both her and all the parents were putting other kids at risk, but this nurse wasn’t putting these specific kids at any more risk than they already had.
Given the fact that the same parents would have just drawn the religious exemption card up until 2019, the danger to no one actuallyincreased it didn’t decrease as it should have. Homeopathy is bullshit and I’m glad another mole providing it has been whacked, but this is not really comparable to ppl switching vaccines with saline or something.
the danger to no one actuallyincreased it didn’t decrease as it should have
That’s a good way of putting it. The danger was supposed to go down, but it did not because of these assholes.
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.
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.
Child Endangerment is also a crime
Wait until she needs a doctor and then send her to a clown doctor instead. So she knows how it feels.
If any of these kids die[d] of Covid, she should be held liable.
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.
So her and the parents then.
Absolutely. Negligent parents should be held accountable.
COVID is tame compared to the diseases we immunize against.
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No, not if you’re looking at all of them.
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Even if that were true, so what?
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