Former nurse practitioner fined record $544K for falsifying children's vaccine records

In the spring of 2019, schools across Long Island began noticing something odd in their immunization files. Children who had previously been exempt from vaccine requirements for religious reasons were suddenly appearing with fresh vaccination records—all from the same practice, Wild Child Pediatrics, all in the same handwriting. The pattern was too neat, too sudden. When New York's Department of Health began to investigate, they uncovered a scheme that would eventually result in the largest vaccine-fraud penalty in the agency's 125-year history: $544,000 against Julie DeVuono, a nurse practitioner from Amityville who had spent years substituting homeopathic pellets for real vaccines while charging parents $85 per dose and falsely recording the transactions in the state's immunization registry.

DeVuono's practice had been quiet for years. From 2002, when she first became licensed as a nurse, until the state eliminated religious exemptions in 2019, she had entered virtually no vaccinations into the state system. Then, abruptly, that changed. Over the next two years, she reported administering more than 7,500 vaccines. Schools grew suspicious. Parents began reporting inconsistencies. One father told investigators that his ex-wife had taken their two children to DeVuono instead of their regular pediatrician, and when he asked the children what happened, they said they received gummy bears, not shots. Blood tests later confirmed what the children had said: at least one of them showed no immunity to diseases she was supposedly vaccinated against.

The mechanics of the fraud were straightforward and damning. A licensed practical nurse who worked for DeVuono testified to state investigators that DeVuono had instructed her to administer homeopathic pellets to certain patients while simultaneously entering false records into the state's electronic immunization database claiming that real vaccines had been given. The state's investigation eventually identified 162 children—most from Long Island, but others from New York City and upstate—who had received these fake vaccinations. That geographic spread itself raised red flags among vaccine-fraud experts, since parents typically do not travel long distances for routine immunizations.

DeVuono's criminal exposure extended beyond the pediatric fraud. In 2023, she pleaded guilty in a separate case involving the sale of fake COVID-19 vaccination cards, admitting that she had made more than $1.2 million from that scheme alone. She lost her nursing licenses as a result. By the time the health department's civil investigation concluded, she had relocated to Pennsylvania and was no longer practicing.

When the health department's administrative law judge issued her ruling in February, she recommended a $544,000 penalty—less than the $1 million the state had requested, but still a historic sum. The health commissioner approved the order in May, and it was released publicly in July. DeVuono's attorney did not respond to requests for comment, and DeVuono herself could not be reached. In her legal filings, she had generally denied the charges but offered no documentation—no medical records, nothing—to support her claim that she had actually administered the vaccines she had recorded.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an expert on vaccine fraud, called the penalty significant and necessary. "The state basically said through this penalty: You will not harm, kill or disable children under false pretenses in New York State," he said. He emphasized that the fine was designed to send a message not just to DeVuono but to any other healthcare provider who might consider similar schemes. "It's meant to be a deterrent to anyone who wants to put kids' lives at risk with a fraudulent profiteering scheme," Caplan said. "That sum is enough to get people's attention."

Dr. James McDonald, the state's health commissioner, framed the penalty as an expression of institutional resolve. "The New York State Department of Health has zero tolerance for those that misrepresent or falsify vaccination records as these acts put lives in jeopardy," he said in a statement. The diseases against which children are vaccinated—measles, mumps, polio—are potentially deadly. Before vaccines existed, they killed thousands of children annually and left others permanently paralyzed. The children DeVuono treated were left unprotected against those threats, their parents believing they had secured immunity when they had not.