Anti-vaxxer Nurse Struck Off

Kate Shemirani Credit: Hollie Adams/Stringer/Getty

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has decided to permanently strike off a nurse from its register for expressing conspiracy theories against COVID-19 vaccines.

Kay Allison Shemirani, who refers to herself as ‘Kate’, achieved notoriety by denying that a COVID pandemic existed, and said that vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been “rushed through” because “they want to kill you”.

Social Media Posts and Rallies

Ms Shemirani, who referred to herself in “prolific” social media posts as a “natural nurse in a toxic world”, also claimed that the vaccines caused long-term health issues and death, led to sterility, cancer, and changed a person’s DNA.

She also suggested that ingesting disinfectant would be less harmful than accepting a COVID vaccine, the panel said.

Other claims included describing nurses as “complicit in murder”, that healthcare professionals administering vaccines should be renamed “death squads”, and that “lots of nurses” were “really s**t”.

Her videos and social media posts had clocked up more than a million hits, according to her claims, the NMC’s Fitness to Practise Committee said. She had also expressed her ‘anti-vaxxer’ views on mainstream media outlets, including the BBC’s Panorama programme, Sky News, and ITV Wales.

She had also been a leading figure in a protest about COVID restrictions held in London’s Trafalgar Square in September last year.

The hearing, held over three days at the end of last month, noted that Ms Shemirani and her representative also made claims linking the pandemic to the mobile phone technology, 5G, and the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates.

Risk to Public Health

Ms Shemirani was originally suspended by the NMC in July 2020 in response to complaints that she was spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and about vaccines.

She made no representations to the panel at its latest meeting.

The panel said that Ms Shemirani seemed to “genuinely believe that there currently is not a global pandemic, that the COVID-19 virus does not exist, that people are not dying from COVID-19, and that vaccines are unsafe and harmful to a person’s health”.

The hearing concluded that Ms Shemirani had “used her status as a registered nurse to widely promote health advice which is contrary to recommended practice and official health advice” and had “also encouraged members of the public to distrust or disregard official health advice”.

Ms Shemirani was given 28 days to appeal against the striking off order.

Article image credit: Hollie Adams/Stringer/Getty