A New York woman pleaded guilty today to fraudulently destroying over 2,600 COVID-19 vaccines and issuing a corresponding number of fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination record cards.
According to court documents, Kathleen Breault, 66, of Cambridge, a midwife at Sage-Femme Midwifery PLLC (Safe-Femme), an authorized COVID-19 vaccine administration site in Albany, New York, conspired to obstruct the government’s distribution of COVID-19 vaccines by providing COVID-19 vaccination record cards to individuals who were not vaccinated, including to minors who were at the time ineligible to be vaccinated and to Canadian citizens who were not present in the United States when they were purportedly vaccinated. In addition to destroying COVID-19 vaccines and issuing fraudulent vaccination record cards, Breault and her co-conspirators made over 2,600 false entries into a New York State database that tracked COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Breault agreed to pay more than $37,000 in restitution for the destroyed vaccines.
Breault pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States and its departments and agencies. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 18 and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
The worst of the worst? It's up there.
Most health care fraud is about money -- ill-gotten gains obtained by billing for services that were never rendered or that were not medically necessary and appropriate. Individual patients are sometimes harmed in these schemes (denied care they actually needed or exposed to treatment risks that were unnecessary), and then there are the addiction cases that -- in addition to the risk of death or serious injury -- often harm not only individuals but also families and contribute to the harm to whole communities. Even "pure financial fraud" harms insurance programs by taking away funds that could otherwise pay for the provision of medical care to patients in need of it.
This case adds another dimension to fraud-based community harms: public health and safety. Falsely documenting vaccinations and diverting thousands of doses of vaccine to the trash is doubly harmful. It allows unvaccinated individuals to work and play within communities that depended on the widest possible rate of vaccination. And many communities at times throughout the worst of the pandemic experienced vaccine shortages. This case isn't only about money. It's about a kind of depraved indifference to communal well-being that is hard to fathom.
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