Between November 2019 and January 2022, a pediatric nurse practitioner on Long Island entered immunization records into New York State’s official vaccination database for hundreds of children who had never received a single shot. The vaccines were real, delivered to her clinic by the state and the federal government for free. She threw them in the trash.
That nurse was Julie DeVuono, 53, owner of Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare in Amityville, New York. On July 9, 2026, the New York State Department of Health announced it had imposed a $544,000 civil penalty against DeVuono, who was found to have falsified vaccination records for 162 school-aged children. The fine is the largest civil penalty imposed for vaccination fraud in the Department of Health’s 125-year history, exceeding a then-unprecedented $300,000 civil penalty imposed in Fall 2023.
Anti-vaccine ideology, a state-sanctioned registry, a willing clientele, and the built-in credibility of a licensed healthcare provider combined to produce a fraud scheme that touches 162 families and leaves a hole in the public health infrastructure that regulators are still working to patch.
Who Was Julie DeVuono, and What Did She Run?
DeVuono operated Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare, a pediatric practice in Amityville, on Long Island’s south shore. The investigation followed her arrest in January 2022 on charges related to a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination card scheme. The Department worked with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, the Suffolk County Police Department, and the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General on the investigation.
DeVuono was arrested alongside Marissa Urrao and accused of charging clients $220 to $350 for an adult vaccination record card and $85 for a child’s card, as part of a large-scale COVID-19 and childhood vaccination scheme. The fraud was not limited to COVID-19 documentation. The vaccinations that were part of DeVuono’s childhood-vaccination fraud scheme included diphtheria, tetanus toxoid-containing and pertussis vaccination (DTaP or Tdap); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV); polio; varicella (chickenpox); meningococcal conjugate vaccination; and the Haemophilus influenzae type b and pneumococcal conjugate vaccinations required for daycare and pre-K.
The falsified records covered nearly the entire schedule of routine childhood immunizations, not just a single pandemic-era card. Investigators revealed that DeVuono received free vaccine doses from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but discarded them. Instead, she charged clients between $220 and $350 for adults and $85 for children in exchange for fake records, and used nearly $237,000 of the accumulated proceeds to pay off her home mortgage.
She was also accused of giving opioid prescriptions to individuals who were not her patients, as People magazine reported. She had already surrendered her nursing license after admitting to a separate scheme involving the writing of fraudulent opioid prescriptions, prescriptions she is said to have issued using the names of her own relatives.
The Criminal Case: Guilty Plea, Forfeiture, and Probation
DeVuono pled guilty to criminal charges related to the COVID-19 vaccination scheme in September 2023 and was sentenced in June 2024 pursuant to a plea agreement. The criminal charges included money laundering, forgery, and offering a false instrument for filing. The plea agreement required DeVuono to surrender her nursing licenses and forfeit more than $1.2 million of proceeds related to her crimes. She is currently serving a five-year probationary sentence.
The civil penalty announced on July 9, 2026 is entirely separate from those criminal consequences. The $544,000 civil penalty DeVuono must now pay is in addition to the $1.2 million she has already forfeited as part of the criminal case. When tallied together, her financial liability now exceeds $1.74 million.
How the Administrative Hearing Established Liability
The civil penalty did not emerge automatically from the criminal conviction. Following an administrative hearing, State Health Commissioner James McDonald adopted the Administrative Law Judge’s Report and Recommendation, sustaining the Department’s charges that DeVuono falsely reported having administered at least one vaccination to 162 different pediatric patients in violation of Public Health Law between November 2019 and January 2022, and imposing the $544,000 civil penalty.
New York Public Health Law allows administrative penalties of up to $2,000 for each falsified vaccination entry. With 162 children, each of whose records contained false entries for multiple vaccine types, the Department’s legal maximum exposure ran into the millions. The $544,000 figure reflects the scale of the scheme across all documented falsified records.
How NYSIIS Made the Fraud, and the Detection, Possible
The New York State Immunization Information System, known as NYSIIS, is a statewide registry that functions as the authoritative record of a child’s vaccination history. Schools, daycares, pediatric providers, and public health officials all rely on it to verify compliance with state immunization requirements.
DeVuono enrolled Wild Child Pediatrics in NYSIIS and then used that access as the primary means of fraud. An investigation by the Department of Health’s Bureau of Investigations determined that DeVuono submitted information to NYSIIS about hundreds of standard pediatric vaccinations that were never administered. Her false vaccination scheme mostly included children from Long Island and the Hudson Valley but also included children from New York City and as far as the Capital District. Over the last two school years, the Department deleted false immunization information that DeVuono submitted to NYSIIS.
Those hundreds of fraudulent entries spanned multiple vaccine types across 162 children’s records. A later review identified an additional 35 students with fraudulent or otherwise invalid Wild Child records after state officials subpoenaed more than 100 schools.
Why Registry Fraud Is More Dangerous Than a Forged Paper Card
Forged paper vaccination cards are a problem. Fraudulent entries in official state immunization registries are a different order of problem entirely. As Medical Daily reported, these registries serve as comprehensive databases that help physicians track vaccination histories, enable schools to verify immunization requirements, and assist health departments during disease outbreaks, all while supporting rapid public health responses through accurate, real-time data.
When false entries corrupt a registry at scale, the downstream effects are serious and hard to reverse. Because fraudulent records make vaccination coverage appear higher than it actually is, health officials may underestimate the number of susceptible children in a community. False entries let unvaccinated children appear fully compliant, increasing exposure risks during outbreaks and making it harder for schools and health departments to identify who actually needs protection. Disease surveillance becomes less accurate, vaccination coverage estimates become unreliable, and outbreak response efforts grow more complicated.
The Families: Disrupted Schooling, Mandatory Re-Vaccination
The most immediate human cost fell on the 162 families whose children’s records had been voided. The state’s health department deleted the false immunization information that DeVuono submitted over the past two school years, and parents who had brought their children to the former nurse’s practice were required to provide proof of immunizations from other providers.
The invalidated records created real problems for families and school districts because New York requires proof of certain immunizations for school attendance. A suburban Long Island school district barred some former Wild Child patients from school after state health officials challenged records tied to DeVuono’s practice, as reported in 2024.
Families were left scrambling: locate original vaccination records from other providers if they existed, schedule re-vaccination appointments, and demonstrate compliance before their children could legally return to school or daycare. The Department of Health’s guidance to schools on vaccination fraud instructs that paper-only records from providers caught falsifying entries should not be accepted. Laboratory proof or other official documentation must back any claim of immunity.
The Broader Context: Vaccine Records Falsification as a Public Health Threat
The DeVuono case sits within a wider pattern that public health researchers have tracked with increasing concern. Fake vaccine trafficking is a recent but growing phenomenon representing a severe threat to public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID vaccines were a prime target, but all types of vaccines are falsified.
Pinning down the full damage from any single falsification scheme takes years, sometimes longer than the scheme itself ran. In 2016, Indonesia discovered that a criminal organization had been smuggling fake vaccines into the country for thirteen years, with combined pediatric vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, poliomyelitis, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b infections, hepatitis B, and tuberculosis distributed across nine regions and nearly forty hospitals and clinics, according to research published in PMC. The global consequences include declining vaccination coverage, loss of epidemic control, resurgence of diseases that had been contained, and deepening public mistrust of science and health authorities.
New York has been more aggressive than most states in building enforcement infrastructure around vaccine records falsification. The DeVuono case is the second time in roughly three years that the state has set a penalty record. The previous record, a $300,000 civil fine, was itself described as unprecedented when it was imposed in Fall 2023. That case also involved a New York nurse practitioner: Sandra Miceli, owner of a Monroe County wellness clinic called Surviving Naturally.
Miceli devised her scheme in response to the elimination of non-medical vaccine exemptions for school-aged children in New York, a legislative change she vehemently opposed. The investigation disclosed Miceli’s history of promoting anti-vaccine sentiments since 2014 on her wellness center’s social media platforms. She submitted falsified vaccination records from 2019 to 2021 for 116 children, primarily in Monroe County, with some residing in Albany and Richmond counties. The falsified records included claims of administering over 500 vaccines to children and falsely attributing vaccinations to other providers when no vaccinations had occurred.
Two separate New York nurse practitioners ran comparable schemes within a few years of each other, both motivated in part by ideological opposition to vaccination mandates and both using state registry access to enter fraudulent data. This reflects a specific vulnerability in how immunization registry access is credentialed and monitored.
Regulatory Response and the Signal the Fine Sends
State officials say the new civil penalty is separate from the criminal consequences and is meant to send a message to anyone tempted to game the immunization system.
The Health Commissioner’s statement on July 9, 2026 was pointed. “Vaccines are the best protection against serious preventable diseases, and 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,” State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said. “Make no mistake, the Department will investigate and hold those accountable who so brazenly undermine our public health system and endanger the health and safety of our communities.”
The State Health Department continues to partner with school officials, local health departments, law enforcement, and other stakeholders around the state to increase awareness of vaccination fraud, detect it, and enforce against it. The department has also published a dedicated vaccination-fraud fact sheet to help schools recognize potentially fraudulent immunization records, and it accepts fraud reports directly via email at [email protected].
Read More: Nurse Practitioner Fined for Faking Vaccine Records
What This Tells Us About the System
The $544,000 fine is the largest in the New York Department of Health’s 125-year history, a number that sounds significant until you note that DeVuono generated more than $1.2 million in criminal proceeds from the scheme alone. Fraud at this scale, pursued with ideological conviction and the built-in credibility of a licensed healthcare provider, was profitable even after forfeiture.
The DeVuono and Miceli cases together show that New York’s enforcement apparatus can identify and prosecute vaccine records falsification after the fact. The detection window, though, is still measured in years rather than weeks. In the time it takes to catch and penalize one provider, hundreds of children can cycle through a school system with no actual immunity on record anywhere except in a database that a single nurse has been corrupting. Hundreds of fraudulent vaccination entries spanning 162 children’s records accumulated across two school years before the state intervened. The record-breaking fine sends a deterrent signal. Whether that signal reaches the right people depends on whether enforcement keeps pace with the next provider who decides that a state immunization database is an opportunity rather than a responsibility.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.