Posted on 07/10/2026 8:27:48 AM PDT by Libloather
A former Long Island nurse who raked in $1.5 million selling fake vaccine cards during the COVID-19 pandemic was slapped with a record-breaking $544,000 fine from the state.
Ex-Amityville practitioner Julie DeVuono, 53, who pleaded guilty to forgery and money laundering back in 2023 was hit with the massive penalty for a “large-scale” scheme where she hawked the phony cards to parents of 162 school-aged kids between November 2019 and January 2022, the state Department of Health announced Thursday.
“This is the largest civil penalty imposed for vaccination fraud in the Department of Health’s 125-year history,” state Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said.
“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,” McDonald added.
DeVuono was originally arrested in January 2022 after investigators uncovered the scheme, and pleaded guilty a year and a half later.
She avoided jail time and was instead sentenced to 840 hours of community service, five years of probation, and had to forfeit $1.2 million, much of which was already seized from her home, along with ledgers documenting the profits.
Her guilty plea also came after two co-defendants originally charged in the scheme, Marissa Urraro, a licensed practical nurse, and receptionist Brooke Hogan reached a secret agreement to testify against their ex-boss, The Post previously reported.
DeVuono, who owned Wild Child Pediatric Center in Amityville, received free shipments of 3,174 vaccine doses through the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but charged customers $220 to $350 for each dose falsely marked on a vax card for adults — and $85 for kids...
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Julie saving one life at a time.
Doesn’t that mean she made nearly $1 million profit?
I say let her keep the money. She was doing a public service for the smart ones.
So... $1 million profit. Seems a good business deal.
She should be honored with a parade and medal
No. She already forfeited $1.2 million so she is in the hole big time. Somebody needs to set up a Go Fund Me page. She is a hero. Her charges were not unreasonable and she saved lives.
That was a noble fraud.
Yes, it does. The ‘fine’ should be on top of paying back all that was stolen. Quite a haul for her. It’s tough, having been raised to believe in the value of hard work and ethical conduct all of my life, to see such criminality rewarded on a daily basis. The sheer number of cases like this seems to have overwhelmed the systems that used to keep society in check. We’re not set up to handle it, as the presumption in the creation of those systems was that while yes, there will be criminality, it will be the exception and not the rule.
>>Doesn’t that mean she made nearly $1 million profit?
Nope, the fine was AFTER forfeiture.
From the article:
“She avoided jail time and was instead sentenced to 840 hours of community service, five years of probation, and had to forfeit $1.2 million, much of which was already seized from her home, along with ledgers documenting the profits.”
Here in Kali all the pot convicts were released upon legalizing marijuana, so how can she be prosecuted when the premise of the charge is a fraudulent scam on the people?
I recently turned someone in for Medicaid fraud. 5 years worth. I found out they got her for $16,400. That is for an estimated $250,000 worth of pure fraud. I wrote the AG a scathing letter and said I’d like to get that kind of return on my money.
Serving the community is what got her in trouble in the first place.
fake vax, fake cards, in this case her wrong made the first one right.
I would never have voted to convict her.
WTF didn’t she have to pay ALL of it back!!!
Read just what was posted and you would see this. On top of that over 500k fine “and had to forfeit $1.2 million, “. That is more than the 1.5 million.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Thanks.
Well hopefully she really made $3 Million or more and invested in Gold or something that they only found she stole $1.5 Million.
Good roi 🤷🏼♂️
That was my first take, but farther down in the article is this: “...had to forfeit $1.2 million, much of which was already seized from her home.”
It’s a regular dog’s breakfast of an article. Impossible to decipher.
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