The law will come down hard on nurses Julie Devuono and Marissa Urraro. They ran a scam COVID vaccination card fraud out of the Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare clinic in Amityville, New York.
For $220, an adult could get a fake card and $85 for each kid. The scam took in at least $1.5 million in profits, meaning that approximately 7,000 individuals bought counterfeit cards in order to “out-slick” the government.
For the nurses, it was more than filling out fake cards for anti-vaxxers to show as proof of vaccination. The nurses also had to access the government database to make it look official. The registered nurses are now charged with counts of second-degree forgery as well as a first-degree charge (in Devuono’s case) of “offering a false instrument for filing.”
Quoting the Suffolk County DA (Raymond Tierney):
“These individuals allegedly used their positions as licensed healthcare professionals to engage in criminal conduct for their financial benefit…”
When the police searched Devuono’s home, they found and ledger book and about $1 million in cash.
Let’s Deconstruct a Little
As I like to remind my followers, frauds of any type can only flourish in the absence of oversite. The two nurses knew that. They had easy access to the cards (hundreds and hundreds of millions have been printed) and they had access to the database. Along the way, maybe early-on along that way, they realized no one was “watching them” and it implied no one cared. Let’s stop for a second to wonder why access to both the cards and the database was made so easy. Should there not be an intermediary of some type? Is there no one who asked the Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare clinic, “You administered (so many) doses of vaccine, but you registered thousands more. How is that?”
That the nurses imposed their personal agendas in creating this scam (out of a need for cash or power or both) is a rather peripheral issue. I can’t get inside their minds but it is a powerful thing for some to believe that they have out-smarted a system (“The Big Bad Government”) that strongly encouraged vaccinations.
What is amazing is that two nurses, who presumably were exposed to ethics training, convinced thousands of adults – and their children – to forego getting protected against the COVID-19 virus.
I am not naïve enough to believe our citizenry are of a similar mindset. In the percentage of those who have railed against vaccinations are those across and entire political spectrum. They hide in places of mis-information, anger, and agenda.
In Suffolk County, New York (where the clinic resides) there have been in excess of 430 thousand COVID cases and more than 1,700 deaths. For the sake of this post, I am assuming (but don’t believe) that all of those convinced to participate in this scam were based in Suffolk County. It means, of course, they were all potential disease carriers. No one can say how far they traveled or who they infected. They seemingly, didn’t care.
Even more mind-boggling was that parents were more than happy, it seems, to fake the records of their children and all that it implies, including school, airline travel and the like. We know that COVID has the potential to not only kill, but to leave other affected victims with severe respiratory and circulatory problems. Were the nurses so unethical they couldn’t imagine one death or one bad case?
Finally, were the parents and guardians so wrapped up in their own narratives that they couldn’t imagine hurting their children – or other people’s children?
We can blame the nurses all we would like, and certainly they face the prospect of jail sentences, but to limit our critique to them alone, is reckless. There is an interconnected web of stupidity bordering on the criminal. No one involved in this scam is beyond blame.
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