The midwife paid a fine and is barred from accessing the state’s vaccine records system.

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).

Homeopathy is a pseudoscience that falsely claims that medical conditions can be cured or prevented by extreme, ritualized dilutions of poisonous substances that cause the same symptoms of a particular disease or condition when administered directly. Homeopathic products are often diluted to such a point that they do not contain a single atom of the original substance. Some homeopaths claim that water molecules can have a “memory” of their contact with the substance, magically imbuing them with healing powers. Homeopathic products work no better than placebos, though if they are improperly diluted, they can be harmful and even deadly.