NEW YORK — A school district in suburban New York has barred a former Pennsylvania nurse from visiting patients after pleading guilty to running a fraudulent coronavirus vaccination card system.
The move by school officials in Long Island’s Plain Edge hamlet comes after Julie DeVuono, owner of Wild Child Children’s Medical Facility in Amityville, and employees forged vaccination cards and embezzled more than $1.5 million from the system. This took place almost three years after he was indicted for the crime.
When DeBuono was arrested in January 2022, prosecutors said she was handing out fake COVID-19 vaccination cards and charging adults $220 and children $85. Officers said they searched DeBuono’s home and found $900,000 in cash.
DeBuono pleaded guilty to money laundering and forgery in September 2023, was sentenced to 840 hours of community service in June, and currently lives in Pennsylvania.
She said after the ruling that she believes front-line workers have the right to refuse vaccination. “If these people were more afraid of the vaccine than they were afraid of getting infected with COVID-19, then everyone in our society has the right to make their own decisions,” DeBuono said.
Meanwhile, the fallout from her plan continues, with New York state health officials last month sending subpoenas to more than 100 school districts to deport approximately 750 patients who were patients at DeBuono and her former practice, Wild Child Pediatrics. Requested for children’s vaccination records.
More than 50 parents of former feral child patients are challenging state and school district efforts to subpoena their children’s records or keep them out of school, Newsday reports.
At Plain Edge, at least two other former patients have been barred from classrooms and are now being educated at home, Superintendent Edward A. Salina Jr. told the newspaper.
DeBuono’s efforts to help parents, public servants and others skip vaccinations come as New York state has enacted some of the strictest coronavirus vaccination rules in the nation, and many public servants and, in New York City, restaurants and other businesses. It was carried out in the midst of affecting regular customers.
Vaccine skepticism grew in the years after COVID-19 emerged, then its status as a threat waned, and childhood vaccination rates for diseases such as measles and polio declined. .
