ALBANY — The owner of an Albany midwife practice and two of her employees have been charged with forging thousands of COVID-19 vaccination cards and then dumping vials of vaccine, according to an indictment filed Thursday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York
Kelly McDermott, a practicing midwife who owns Sage-Femme Midwifery, is alleged to have conspired with midwife Kathleen Breault and nurse Sherilyn Pellitteri to enroll the facility as an authorized COVID-19 vaccine provider in order to issue fraudulent vaccination cards, according to prosecutors.
The defendants are also accused of destroying COVID-19 vaccine doses that they alleged to the state health department were injected into patients.
The alleged scheme was first flagged in February 2022 by the Department of Health’s Vaccination Complaint Investigations Team, which identified discrepancies in the facility’s reporting — including minors who were not yet eligible to be vaccinated and non-citizens of the U.S. who were out of the country during the period when they purportedly got the shots — and referred the matter to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations.
“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 vaccination program, the department has played a proactive role in investigations of vaccination fraud and abuse,” DOH spokeswoman Cadence Acquaviva said. “We’re proud of the department’s contributions to this and other cases of vaccination fraud investigated and prosecuted statewide.”
The decline in popularity of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine also drew attention to Sage-Femme. By February 2022, when the state launched its investigation, the midwifery practice had become one of the largest Johnson & Johnson vaccine distributors in New York, state Department of Health records show.
The defendants, who have offices in Albany,…
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