State ordered more than 200 Long Island schools to bar students over bogus vaccination records

The state Health Department in January ordered 201 schools across Long Island to bar students from the classroom because of phony vaccination documents, state records show.

Newsday this week obtained a list of schools required by the state Department of Health to remove about 1,500 students statewide after determining that a Baldwin midwife submitted fraudulent records for their required vaccines such as mumps, measles and polio.

The list, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request, shows Jeanette Breen’s practice covered a wide swath of Long Island — 81 of 124 districts, along with four private schools.

They range from kindergarten programs to elementary, middle and high schools from some of the largest districts, such as Massapequa and Sachem, to some of the smallest, such as Island Trees and Sag Harbor.

Officials previously placed the number of Long Island students with vaccines from Breen at nearly 700.

The numbers, coupled with the geographic range of impacted districts, show the lengths to which many Long Island parents have gone to escape vaccinating their children following a 2019 law that ended religious exemption for state-mandated shots, an expert said.

“This is very troubling because of the broad scope of the fraud,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and an expert on vaccine policy. “Now we can see that people were thinking of ways to avoid vaccination from all over the place.”

Newsday requested the list of schools in January, days after the health department announced that it fined Breen as much as $300,000 for falsely reporting children were immunized with vaccines needed to attend school in New York, such as tetanus, hepatitis B and rubella.

Instead, Breen gave the patients “a series of oral pellets marketed online by an out-of-state homeopath as an alternative to vaccination,” according to the state health department stipulation agreement, dated November 2023, that she signed.

The Nassau District Attorney’s Office, which said in January it was reviewing the situation, said this week the review is ongoing.

Breen this week declined Newsday’s interview request via a text message because, she said, “my story is far too political to be talking to the press.” Her attorney, David M. Eskew, of Manhattan, declined to comment.

The list names specific schools that had enrolled students impacted by the health department’s order but does not state how many students at each school could no longer attend classes until they provide new proof of the childhood vaccines.

Local county health officials said in January that 397 students in Nassau and 273 in Suffolk had vaccine records from Breen that excluded them from school.

Suffolk health department spokeswoman Grace Kelly-McGovern said Thursday that approximately 100 of those students in Suffolk “have not returned to school because their parents elected to home-school them.” Nassau health department officials did not return messages seeking comment.

Of the 81 Long Island districts represented, 10 had more than five schools listed: Bellmore-Merrick, Long Beach, Massapequa, Oceanside, Rockville Centre and Syosset in Nassau, and Commack, Northport, Sachem and Smithtown in Suffolk.

The superintendents from those districts either declined to comment or did not respond to messages seeking how many students provided proof of new vaccines to return to school.

Caplan reviewed the list of schools for Newsday and said he was surprised by the variety of Long Island towns represented, given the short time Breen was found to have provided fake vaccines. State health officials said Breen’s fraud occurred for three years until 2022, and included upstate schools from as far away as near Buffalo and Saratoga.

“How did she get known so rapidly? How did word-of-mouth go?” Caplan asked.

The state health department said Breen began submitting fraudulent childhood vaccine information to the state in September 2019. That month a new law took effect abolishing the religious exemption to vaccines required to attend school following the worst measles outbreak in nearly three decades.

Breen told the state she gave 12,449 vaccines to 1,452 children that the health department investigators later determined were fake, the agreement with the state said.

Parents of the students banned from schools in January were given no forewarning, according to Rita Palma, who fought against the 2019 law on behalf of two anti-vaccine activist groups, the New York Alliance for Vaccine Rights and Children's Health Defense.

Palma, 61, of Blue Point, said she’s been in touch with some of the families who were told their children could no longer attend their schools because of their invalidated vaccination status.

“Having your child thrown out of school flips your world upside down,” said Palma, who added that she used to help parents secure religious exemptions before the law change. “It makes your children feel unworthy and you, as a parent, angry at the injustice of it all.”

Two Long Island fathers whose children were excluded from school following the state health department order filed separate lawsuits against Long Island school districts seeking to keep their children in school.

Michael DeVardo’s lawsuit against the Franklin Square school district, dated Jan. 31, said Breen assured him “that these were legitimate immunizations that are also approved in many foreign countries and other states across America.”

DeVardo dropped his suit Feb. 1. His Syosset-based attorney James Mermigis, in a text message exchange, declined to say why his client dropped the case. DeVardo, reached by phone, declined to comment.

The other suit, by John Giouvalakis against the Cold Spring Harbor district, said the district initially accepted his son’s vaccination records and denied him due-process rights after it “unilaterally determined” his son could no longer attend school.

The district, in court papers, said educational law calls for due-process rights in cases of misconduct and that this was different because it removed him from school after it “received a lawful directive” from the health department.

That case continues in Nassau County Supreme Court. Neither Giouvalakis nor his Uniondale-based lawyer Chad LaVeglia returned messages.

Breen’s midwife license and prescription certification privilege are still active, state records show. The agreement did not bar her from continuing to practice as a midwife, which is a medical professional who cares for women during childbirth. She has been licensed since 1995.

A spokesman for the state Education Department, which has the authority over Breen’s midwife license, did not return a message seeking comment.

Her agreement said she has to pay only half the $300,000 state fine if she complies with its terms, including no longer accessing the state system medical professionals use to submit childhood vaccines.

Breen agreed to not administer a vaccination that must be reported to the state registry. Any record she provides to patients about products claiming to provide immunity must clearly state they are not recognized by the government as alternatives to conventional vaccinations, the agreement says.

By Jim Baumbach

jim.baumbach@newsday.com

Jim Baumbach is an award-winning investigative reporter at Newsday, where he has worked since 1998. He spent two decades in the sports department, where he covered every professional team and league, including events such as the Super Bowl and World Series.