Julie DeVuono, former nurse practitioner, gets historic $544,000 state penalty for falsifying pediatric vaccine records

New York's health department has fined a former nurse practitioner from Amityville more than $500,000 — the agency’s largest vaccine-fraud penalty ever — for falsifying immunization records of 162 kids, mostly from Long Island.

The fine against Julie DeVuono, which came after a yearslong Department of Health civil investigation, was part of a legal order against DeVuono that was released on Thursday. In 2023, she lost her nursing licenses when she pleaded guilty in a separate criminal case in which she admitted making more than $1.2 million selling fake COVID-19 vaccine cards.

In the pediatric vaccine fraud case, the health department said, DeVuono gave homeopathic pellets to parents who didn’t want their children vaccinated against diseases like measles, the mumps and polio, but she recorded the pellets as actual vaccines in the state’s electronic immunization registry.

“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," the state's health commissioner, Dr. James McDonald, said in a news release Thursday.

Measles and other diseases against which children are vaccinated are potentially deadly, and before vaccines were available, killed thousands of children a year, and left others paralyzed.

Vaccine-fraud expert Arthur Caplan lauded the health department’s action.

“It’s a significant fine," said Caplan, a recently retired professor of bioethics in New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “The state basically said through this penalty: You will not harm, kill or disable children under false pretenses in New York State."

Caplan said the fine sends a message to other health care providers.

“It’s meant to be a deterrent to anyone who wants to put kids’ lives at risk with a fraudulent profiteering scheme," he said. “That sum is enough to get people’s attention who might engage in this."

The health department had requested a $1 million fine but an administrative law judge recommended the $544,000 penalty in a Feb. 17 ruling, and McDonald, the health commissioner, approved it in a May 27 order that was released Thursday.

DeVuono, who now lives in Pennsylvania, could not be reached for comment. Her Garden City attorney, William P. Nolan, did not return phone calls.

DeVuono “generally denied the Department’s charge," the order states, yet she provided no proof — such as medical records that she was required by law to create — verifying she administered the vaccinations that the state said were never given to patients.

Schools began alerting the health department of suspicious vaccine records from DeVuono’s Wild Child Pediatrics practice in 2019, after the state ended a religious exemption for vaccines. “Certain schools reported that children who were previously exempt from immunization requirements due to religious reasons were appearing at school with handwritten immunization records indicating that they had received all required immunizations from the Respondent's Wild Child practice," Administrative Law Judge Jeanne T. Arnold wrote in her February report.

Separately, the state became suspicious after DeVuono suddenly began reporting a large number of vaccinations shortly after the religious exemption ended.

DeVuono did not enter any vaccinations in the state’s immunization registry from 2002, when she was first licensed as a nurse, until after the end of religious exemptions, Newsday previously reported. She then reported administering more than 7,500 vaccines over the next two years.

The state began investigating DeVuono in 2019, but the health department’s response to the pandemic postponed the probe, Arnold wrote.

A licensed practical nurse who worked for DeVuono testified to state investigators that DeVuono told her to give certain patients the homeopathic pellets but to falsely state in the immunization registry that she gave them authentic vaccinations, the report stated. DeVuono charged $85 for each pellet.

DeVuono also administered real vaccines to some patients, the state said.

Although most of the 162 children were from Long Island, others were from New York City or upstate, health department spokeswoman Erin Clary said in an email. Vaccine-fraud experts said that’s suspicious because parents don’t typically travel long distances for vaccinations.

One parent told investigators that his ex-wife had taken their two children to DeVuono, rather than the kids’ regular pediatrician, but the children said they did not receive shots in the arm — only gummy bears, Arnold wrote in her report. Blood tests of the children indicated that at least one showed no immunity from some of the diseases she was purportedly vaccinated against.

In administrative cases, the state is required to show that the “preponderance of evidence" indicates an illegal action. In criminal cases, prosecutors must prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt." Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney has said the difficulty of meeting that higher bar is why DeVuono has not been criminally charged with pediatric vaccine fraud.