Health and Medicine

What Led a Midwife to Fake 12,499 Vaccine Records?

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Earlier this year, New York health authorities made a stunning announcement: 1,452 students across the state were attending school with falsified vaccination records. A single midwife operating out of a small storefront on Long Island had given them homeopathic pellets instead of shots with genuine protective powers against measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, and other viruses. The case made instant headlines and then faded, leaving parents with many unanswered questions. Were her clients tricked or in on it? Was the midwife a dyed-in-the-wool anti-vaxxer or motivated by profit — or something else? James D. Walsh’s story today begins to fill in the answers, finding a placenta-burying, hospital-suing, nosode-hawking thorn in the side of the medical Establishment. She’s still practicing.

—Nick Summers, features editor, New York 

What Led a New York Midwife to Fake 12,499 Vaccine Records? And what, exactly, did parents know?

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo Getty Images
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