Julie DeVuono, a 51-year-old nurse, pleaded guilty yesterday to fraud and money laundering for raising $1.5 million by selling fake vaccine cards during the COVID-19 pandemic on Long Island (NY).
As part of the plan, the nurse laundered $236,980 to pay the mortgage on a house she shared with her husband Derin De Vuono an NYPD police officer, according to the district attorney.
The nurse was arrested in January 2022. Now after pleading guilty, she is expected to avoid jail, but must surrender $1.2 million in criminal proceeds, perform 840 hours of community service, surrender his license to practice, and close his pediatric business, Kids-on-Call.
“This defendant used her position as a nurse practitioner to avoid the law.” uploading false information into databases throughout New York State,” denounced the district attorney of the Suffolk county, Ray Tierney. “He took advantage of the public’s fears and mistrust during the COVID lockdown to falsify cards for the vaccine he never administered, for no other purpose than his own enrichment.”
DeVuono’s guilty plea comes after two co-accused subordinates originally -Marissa Urraro, a licensed practical nurse, and receptionist Brooke Hogan- They reached a secret agreement to testify against her according to, New YorkPost. Prosecutor Tierney’s spokespersons did not want to talk about those cases, which are sealed.
DeVuono Pediatric Center in Amityville received free shipments of 3,174 vaccine doses through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) federal. But employees charged customers between $220 and $350 for each dose falsely marked on a vaccination card for adults and $85 for children and then They threw the vaccine in the trash.
The false information was recorded in the New York State Immunization Information System (NYSIIS).. DeVuono “accepted responsibility for his role and participation in the administration of false vaccination cards,” his attorney Steven Gaitman summarized.
In December 2021, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, decreed that producing or using a false coronavirus vaccination card was a state crime, as well as a federal oneadding another option to prosecute the users and providers of those fraudulent documents.
In the fall that year Several NYC employees were accused of using fake cards to circumvent then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s municipal vaccination mandate, including two high-ranking NYPD police officers who were stripped of their shields and weapons for it.