A Utah plastic surgeon and three of his colleagues flushed about 2,000 doses of vaccine down the drain, sold counterfeit vaccination cards for $50 each, and tricked children into getting COVID vaccinations. The federal government has been charged with a year-long scheme to make people believe that -19 by injecting them with saline, 391 times in total.
Federal prosecutors said last week that Dr. Michael Kirk Moore Jr., who owns and operates the Utah Institute of Plastic Surgery in Midvale, south of Salt Lake City, and his office manager, Kari Dee Burgoyne, the receptionist. Indicted Sandra Flores. Moore’s neighbor, Christine Jackson Andersen. All four are indicted on two of his charges related to conspiracy to defraud the federal government and improper disposal of government property.
According to the indictment, which was unsealed Jan. 17, Moore, Burgoyne, Flores and Andersen planned the plastic surgery clinic to become a legal COVID-19 vaccine provider. Moore said he signed the government’s COVID-19 vaccination program provider contract in May 2021, allowing the site to receive genuine his COVID-19 vaccines purchased by the government. Between October 15, 2021 and he September 6, 2022, the group ordered about 2,200 doses of the vaccine from the federal government.
Around October, the group began notifying people they knew of an interest in fake COVID-19 vaccinations. Federal prosecutors called them “fraudulent Vax card seekers.” His Burgoyne, his manager in the office, was responsible for coordinating the scheme and worked as follows. If a fraudulent seeker of his Vax card called the practice, Burgoyne instructed him to contact his Moore neighbor, Andersen. Andersen then conducted a shy screening by asking who had referred the contact to the clinic and only accepted applicants who were referred by someone who had already received a fraudulent vaccination card from the scheme. Andersen conducted this screening process with his two separate undercover agents.
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Once reviewed, Andersen instructed job seekers to make a “donation” of $50 per person per appointment via Venmo or PayPal, with the money going to an unnamed “charity.” I was. Federal prosecutors said the charity had ties to Moore’s organization and sought to “liberate medical professionals from government and industry conflicts of interest.”
After making a donation and confirming with Andersen, applicants make an appointment at the Plastic Surgery Center. When they walked in, Flores, the receptionist, Burgoyne, or other staff members fraudulently filled out COVID-19 vaccination cards saying the seekers had been vaccinated. During that time, the defendants pulled COVID-19 doses from government-provided vials and “squirted them down the drain from a syringe,” prosecutors claimed. Excludes.
For minors, prosecutors said the group administered saline at the request of their parents to make them believe the children had been vaccinated against COVID-19. , confirmed by one of the undercover agents who asked about bringing the child, Flores responded by handing him a note that read, “If you are under 18, I will inject you with saline.”
Throughout the scheme, the group reported the names of all vaccine applicants to the Utah Immunization Information System. This indicates that the clinic administered his 1,937 doses of her COVID-19 vaccine, which included his 391 childhood doses. The total for all doses was approximately $28,000. Funding from the $50 vaccination card totaled nearly $97,000, and federal prosecutors calculated the plan was valued at nearly $125,000.
“By forging vaccine cards and allegedly giving children saline injections instead of COVID-19 vaccines, the provider not only endangered the health and well-being of vulnerable people, but also the public. It has undermined the credibility of the agency and the integrity of the federal health care program,” Kurt Muller, a special agent in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Inspector General, said in a statement.
Defendants are scheduled to appear in court on January 26.
