Who is the conspiracy theorist blamed by her sons for her daughter’s death?

Kate “Kay” Shemirani was struck off as a nurse after promoting “harmful misinformation” about the Covid-19 pandemic, and is now a prominent online conspiracy theorist.

Speaking at an anti-lockdown event in July 2021, she compared NHS workers with Nazis convicted at the Nuremberg trials, and implied that they should be hanged.

Ms Shemirani was removed from Twitter for spreading her false claims about the pandemic and vaccines in 2022, before being reinstated when Elon Musk took control of the platform.

In July 2024, her daughter Paloma died aged 23 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, after Ms Shemirani advised against chemotherapy and created an “alternative” treatment plan.

On Thursday, she was found to have “adversely influenced” her daughter’s decisions and her actions were called “egregious and incomprehensible” by coroner Catherine Wood.

The treatment programme, designed after Paloma went back to live with Ms Shemirani six months before her death, was based on controversial Gerson therapy.

It involved Paloma having up to five coffee enemas a day and adhering to a strict diet including a lot of green juices, the inquest heard.

Her mother told the court that she had used those methods to recover from cancer herself a decade earlier.

When Paloma was diagnosed in late 2023, doctors said she had an 80% chance of recovery if she had chemotherapy.

Her brothers Gabriel and Sebastian Shemirani have been very vocal in blaming their mother for asserting control over their sister and causing her death.

Gabriel has said that Alex Jones, an American conspiracy theorist who claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged, was the “soundtrack” to the school run for him and Paloma.

He has also said that his father, Faramarz Shemirani, started his mother’s interest in conspiracy theories when he became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job.

Ms Shemirani told Kent and Medway Coroner’s Court: “Paloma made her own treatment choices based on her values, research and experiences.”

Paloma’s brother brought a High Court case to challenge whether his sister could exercise her capacity to make decisions without her mother’s influence.

Those proceedings were ongoing when she died.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) committee found she had spread Covid-19 misinformation that “put the public at a significant risk of harm”, in 2021, having originally qualified in the 1980s.

Ms Shemirani continues to use the term “nurse” to describe herself online, which was discussed in Parliament by MPs in February this year.

Labour MP Dawn Butler called for the title to be legally protected, to stop it from being “exploited” in a way that could be “quite dangerous” for patients.

“Kate Shemirani was a nurse who claimed 5G caused Covid symptoms and spread vaccine misinformation. She was struck off, but she was still able to call herself a nurse and was legally able to do so,” said Ms Butler during a speech to Parliament.

It has been reported that after working as a nurse Ms Shemirani was a British Airways long-haul flight attendant in the 1990s, and that she put her dismissal as a nurse down to “jealousy” from other nurses because she was “always very thin”.

Ms Shemirani continues to voice her anti-medicine, anti abortion, free-speech focused Christian values on her social media and podcast, and offers advice to others as a “medical” expert.

Vaccines are the most effective way to prevent infectious disease and have virtually eradicated smallpox, polio and tetanus in the UK, the NHS says.

If people stop being vaccinated then diseases can quickly spread again, it said, pointing to a spike in measles and mumps between 2016 and 2018.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism, allergies or other conditions, weaken the immune system in any way, or contain harmful ingredients, it adds.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the biggest threats to global health.