A quack found a gullible market.
A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.
Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the “Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program.”
The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).
Ms. Breen is a crook who deserves to have the book thrown at her — she has been fined $150,000, so I think she got off easy. I would point out, however, that you know the people who took the stupid pills knew exactly what they were doing, explicitly and knowingly avoiding giving their kids a real prophylactic, and that they ought to at least get a token slap. Their kids have been kicked out of school, punishing the victims, until the parents provide genuine proof of vaccination.
I wish there was a time machine that would transport these BS susceptible parents back to a time before vaccines when childhood and other diseases were rampant. Few have any realization what the minimal risk of vaccination prevents.
That Merck commercial about HPV vaccination where the cancer stricken adult backtracks through their life to shame the parent was on point but maybe non-effective.
Vaccine whispering sounds interesting in the same Socratic vein as street epistemology if that latter approach hadn’t been started by an anti-woke reactionary.
At twelve years old I forced my daughter get the HPV vaccination; she is/was deathly afraid of needles. The event was very traumatic for her. She is now 28 and as far as I can tell she has no remembrance of the vaccination. To this day she has to be tranquilized before getting bloodwork drawn. Me OTH, I feel satisfied knowing my daughter has protection from HPV and the stress at the time of the vaccination was well worth it.
If one of those kids dies of one of those diseases, she should be prosecuted for manslaughter.
So you’re saying that the Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program was a RIHP Off?
It would be interesting to know how many people who take homeopathic products know the actual concept of how they’re supposed to work. I suspect a large percentage of buyers, and sellers for that matter, think homeopathic is just a synonym for herbal medicine. When it’s actually a synonym for water.
Nope, fine the parents each and every day that the children are not properly immunized, counting weekends, starting from the date that they had the woo pills administered.
They can entirely avoid the fine by proving beyond a reasonable doubt ignorance (good luck proving that) or getting into a time machine and getting the children properly immunized and the children are prohibited from being on school grounds until they are properly immunized.
The former, punishing the parents for their crimes, the latter protecting the other students.
As time machines are in short supply, Obama having the only one per Trump, that administers justice to the parents and protects the community schoolchildren.
We’ve only been vaccinating against HiB and PCV for a bit over a century, with just a wee bit of proof of efficacy and safety proved throughout that century.
Measles ravages the immune system, erasing a great deal of hard won immunities by destroying memory immune cells. Every one of the vaccine preventable diseases can kill, so they’re essentially giving the entire community a risk of life of loved ones as running around randomly firing a machine gun. So, penalize them and prohibit access to public places – especially germ breeding factories that are our schools.
And having lost a favorite aunt to cervical cancer, which her idiot physician blamed on her husband and children smoking, not the uncle that was a merchant marine that she had to drive two hours each month to collect his paycheck, I’m more than happy to be as gentle about antivaxxer activity as a sledgehammer.
timgueguen @ 5, well, all water basically started out as seawater. Seawater has gold present in small quantities, so given the amount of water that I drink, I’m homeopathiclly wealthy. Pity I can’t pay for a stick of gun with that wealth.
Water has memory, what a bunch of inane bullshit!
But hey, Mars has homeopathic air. No need to supply Musk and his merry band of morons, should he ever try to colonize the planet!
wzrd1@6–
I don’t want to defend that doctor because I don’t know how he communicated, but smoking is a major risk for cervical cancer and even passive smoking has an odds ratio of around 1.7. The main culprit is almost always HPV (a small proportion of cases have no HPV DNA in the tumour cells), but smoking can be a significant contributor.
Also, Hib vaccine has only been available since 1996. I’m not sure you meant to type PCV (porcine circovirus???). Was it meant to be HPV? In which case the vaccine was only introduced in 2006. Or HCV (Hepatitis C)? In which case there is still no vaccine.
Thinking in alternate realities I wish I had been born after vaccinations against chickenpox and HPV were available. I don’t know if I’d been exposed to the latter but did have chickenpox and recently received a shingles vaccine to prevent it reawakening and ravaging my dermatomes. The kids these days are so fortunate if they have provaxxer parents.
@2 You had a kid at 12? (Sorry, stupid joke).
Thanks for doing the right thing for your kid (and all the other kids around them).
The world is full of evil people, from Trump at one level to scum like this at another. The only difference is in the number of victims.
Jackass Coyne not only worships Christopher Hitchens despite his unacknowledged criticism of Zionism and Israeli policies against Palestinians (Coyne is clueless on that) but he also kisses Bill Maher’s ass despite the health quackery. Frickin’ Family Guy guy is more critical of Maher and on point than fanboy Coyne:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=tm7D8eEr3gDi-YtZ&v=Q93wbXNE_dQ
WTF is wrong with Coyne? He thought his hero Pinker was part of the fabled Four Horsemen:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/19/sam-harris-on-free-speech-the-middle-east-war-religion-and-proportionality/
I doubt the jackass is familiar with Hitchens’ expressed views on Palestinians vs Israelis (Zionists). But this should indicate what biases Coyne’s profound ignorance:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/17/memri-and-the-war/
Yeah such an exclusive to brag about.
And:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
Add that to his uncritical osculation of snotty elitist Maher here:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/01/20/bill-maher-has-a-new-rule-which-is-his/
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Hemidactylus, you clearly have a thing about Coyne. No worries.
Still, it would be nice if you exercised your vituperation towards him when it had some sort of relevance to the post, which is about flogging genuine homeopathic pellets instead of actual vaccines and profiting thereby.
(In case I was too subtle with my little joke: If they really were bogus homeopathic pellets, as quoted, then they wouldn’t be actual homeopathic pellets, would they? If oral vaccines had been a thing, it would be amusing if a midwife sold actual vaccines but pretended they were homeopathic, which would truly be bogus homeopathic stuff)
I mean, there are people I don’t like, too — but I don’t just pick random threads on which to express my opinion about them. And if I did, I might expect people to address my irrelevant post.
Anyway. Are you aware there’s an Endless Thread where you can post any sort of comment about anything, subject to Lynna’s tolerance? I am.
BTW, Hemidactylus, you’ve posted 3 links to his site in your last two comments.
Search engines note that sort of thing, never mind that at least some people will click on them.
(You are increasing his site’s relevance to the robots, and probably driving at least some new traffic his way)
chrislawson @ 8, see the final paragraph for abbreviations used. PCV being pneumococcal vaccine.
There was quite a bit of commentary during the 1918 pandemic by physicians, who had been happily producing vaccines against various bacterial infections in their offices and then influenza reared its head to confound them. At the time, the existence of viruses being a widely dismissed theory, despite evidence of ultrafilterable, non-microscopically observable agents.
Huh, I see a candidate vaccine for hep C now, with one novel approach leveraging immune signaling and a highly conserved viral DNA segment. Hopefully, that’ll pan out!
The Ads Technica article doesn’t say what type of midwife she is, direct entry or certified nurse midwife, only that she is “licensed”. The latter have actual nursing credentials and graduate degrees. I am curious to know what kind of professional training/certification she has, if any.
Found this interesting and informative.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/12/26/maryland-board-of-nursing-backlog-midwives/
I also noticed the location of Jeannette Breen’s midwifery business–Nassau County, NY. NY has the largest Jewish community in the US and a significant portion of that population is orthodox or ultra-orthodox, ie, communities that refuse to vaccinate their children (which is also why they are perpetually one of the big hotspots for childhood disease outbreaks.)
https://www.jewishdatabank.org/content/upload/bjdb/358/C-NY-New_York-2002_Slide_Set_Profile_of_Long_Island_Jewish_Community.pdf
I’m guessing she made a heap of money “vaccinating” kids (how is that legal, btw? she is a MIDWIFE, not a PEDIATRICIAN.) in the orthodox and ultra-orthodox communities, who probably knew goddamn well that the pills were fake AF. In which case, a $150,000 fine is a slap on the wrist.
Baldwin in Nassau county . I used to have a friend who lived there. It’s not too far from NYC . I’m sure that she got a lot of gullible parents not just sneaky ones trying to avoid vaccines. Even in a cosmopolitan area like NYC and environs there is a lot of creationist pseudoscience type ignorance of basic biology . Frankly it makes me scream but I do my little part by correcting creationist ignorance online and if I bump into it among my friends, neighbors and acquaintances.
My much older cousin caught measles as a child . It crippled her ! My mother made sure my sister and I were vaccinated against polio . I got every vaccine that was available for my kids mainly because I remembered getting measles at age 5 . I got very sick, it’s not at all like a bad head cold! Chickenpox is a miserable experience too. Why would anyone put their children through that?
Parents who would rather be “right” with a dead kid than be wrong with a live kid.
The Better Half has a cousin who is dying from the late onset effects of having measles, which she got before there was a vaccine. She has subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which will kill her. She already uses a wheelchair and has the stairlift in her home because she can no longer climb stairs under her own power. SSPE will kill her in the relatively near future, in her 60s. Based on socioeconomic status and family history, she could have otherwise expected to live into her 90s.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/measles-the-forgotten-killer-2019052316683
Measles is very contagious. One person with measles, let loose in a community without immunity, will infect nine to 18 other people. In 2002, the United States was declared free from ongoing measles transmission in 2000. But we’re vulnerable to cases imported from elsewhere. Occasional large outbreaks have occurred in recent years when measles has been unleashed in regions with low vaccination rates. In 2014, 383 people got measles in an Amish community in Ohio. In 2017, 79 people were infected in Minnesota, most of them unvaccinated Somali-American children. Since the beginning of 2019, more than 800 cases have been reported in a multistate outbreak. A large number of cases have occurred in Orthodox Jewish populations in New York City, and a smaller number among unvaccinated children in Washington State. No one has yet died as a result of these outbreaks, due to the capabilities of modern medicine and a good measure of dumb luck. But the intensity and scope of these outbreaks threatens to bring measles back as a full-time threat to American kids.
Really, these antivaxxer parents should be prosecuted for child abuse. Because withholding lifesaving medical care is considered child abuse (by neglect).
@19 PS: Your mom rocks.
I got pertussis as a early 30s adult, the new variant one that blew right through my DPT vaccination. I caught it in an outbreak, before anyone knew that pertussis had mutated to the point where anyone who had gotten the original vaccine was no longer protected.
I was sick with it for 2-3 months and deathly ill and weak for another 6 months after that. After I got it, it was easy to see why people die from pertussis and pertussis isn’t even the deadliest childhood disease. The pertussis vaccine has since been updated and I get the DPT every 5 years or so at work (my federal workplace offers it for free) just because I don’t want to take any chances and I NEVER want to go through that again.
The world got new variant pertussis because of stupid selfish antivaxxers. Every incidence of contagious disease is an opportunity for the pathogen to mutate to the point where previous vaccinations/treatments no longer work. If antivaxxers had STFU and gotten vaccinated, measles would be exterminated globally. Measles was originally on track to be eliminated worldwide by 2015. Instead, now the new target date is 2030. The concept of “taking one for the team” is clearly not one that has penetrated their pointy selfish little heads.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7236a3.htm#:~:text=After%20a%20review%20in%202021,countries%20by%202030%20(8).
https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/health_publications/itfde/updated_disease_candidate_table.pdf
Fuck those assholes forever.
The bear of it is, measles basically wipes out immune memory, so previous infections basically are novel infections for the body.
So, “My child has a strong immune system” idiot is actively trying their level best to weaken that immune system and risk a fatal SSPE infection 6 – 12 years on average later.
But then, I’m amazed that they’re not demanding that smallpox be reintroduced.