Anti-vaxx nurse struck off

People are sacked all the time for expressing their opinions. There's nothing controversial about it. When my DH worked for Tesco, for example, if he had started telling the customers "This stuff is rubbish and it will probably poison you. Don't buy it," he would have been out of the door before he could blink. It's completely different to me expressing that opinion as a customer.

Obviously the potential harm is greatly increased when medical matters are concerned.

It’s not just an opinion, Galaxy, she’s spreading dangerous and harmful mis-information.

As a nurse she should know better, and I’m glad that she won’t be able to spread this rubbish to vulnerable people who are more likely to believe it.

theworriedwell.

I have been working in the NHS 42 years 24 of those years in senior positions . Not all nurses who are uni so-called trained are thick but a significant number of them have no bedside manner are unable to communicate effectively with patients and frankly are too far up themselves to be interested in what’s going on around them. There used to be SRNs SENs Auxiliary nurses. The SRNs were the work planners and helped run the wards the SENs were the assistants to the SRNs, the SENs and Auxiliaries were the ones who actually did the more “ hands on are” the SRNs were mainly admin duties / drug rounds / liaison with families / families and consultants. A lot of Uni nurses think they are matrons.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion or belief. There have been over 1200 deaths associated with the vaccines here in the UK. If this nurse is in a low risk group ie young with no co morbidities then she is perfectly entitled to refuse the vaccine. The mistake she has made is by voicing that opinion, as she is not paid to influence patients with their decision making regarding vaccination.

I am a committed anti vaxer..........

Give me a dyson any day ???
I’m so sorry ,just couldn’t resist

sparkynan .., Of course we remember david ike. He and Piers Corbyn and Kate Shemirani are heading the demonstrations and calling it a hoax. read below.

www.thejc.com/news/uk/revealed-anti-vaxx-nurse-at-centre-of-covid-hate-demos-1.506354

A lovely girl works in a Care Home. She contracted Covid in January. She’s now eligible for vaccination but has declined to have it. Obviously it’s her decision but I asked why not? She said she was fearful about what would happen if she became pregnant. Especially as she has heard bout Thalidomide. All care home residents have been fully vaccinated.

The mistake she has made is by voicing that opinion, as she is not paid to influence patients with their decision making regarding vaccination
In uniform thereby adding weight and the veneer of an official, professional medical opinion to her own misguided beliefs. This is obvious.
If I as a train passenger tell somebody that I think their train leaves from platform B I may be right or wrong and might accidentally be misleading them, but if I am part of the Station staff it is my job to give accurate information.
Even more so in a life and death situation like a pandemic.

Thalidomide was not a vaccine but an early anti sickness medicine. I wish those people who are refusing to be vaccinated would read up on facts and not accept the word of someone on Facebook etc.

Grandmabatty well said. There is so much misleading info out there. The FullFact.org is a good site. They explain that most of the number of “deaths from vaccination” are actually deaths from an underlying cause that would have happened regardless of being vaccinated or not. It helps to read the facts to reduce the worries and concerns that people naturally have.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Maybe she has severe mental health issues that have just come to light. It is better for her and everyone that she is not working but I don’t think we should be too quick to judge

I ve been a registered nurse (and previously a midwife ) for 46 years now, latterly working in travel medicine and teaching vaccination and immunisation and infectious diseases to practice nurses, GPs and pharmacists. I retired just before Covid but when the vaccination programme rolled out I went back to work to help and have so far vaccinated thousands of people as part of an extremely hard working team made up of retired doctors and nurses like myself and other drs, nurses, admin staff and students and young people from our local area. I ll be working tomorrow morning vaccinating (Sunday), I m 64 years old and I’m immensely proud of what we are doing and of what we have achieved in such a short space of time. It saddens me to read about this nurse and her calling us “death squads” and it is immensely insulting. Sadly there are many people who will listen to her opinions as she is spouting them under the guise of her nurse background. I spend a lot of time explaining to patients who are unsure about vaccination and reassuring them and so far have not had anyone refuse, but people like her are certainly not helping. It might be prudent to remember at this stage that were it not for vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus, polio, smallpox, rubella, measles etc many of us, including her, might not be around today in order to have the privilege of being able to make informed choices and have opinions. There is no issue with someone expressing opinions, but doing it publicly and aggressively in a way that is likely to adversely affect other people in your professional capacity is unacceptable.
How many people will be using her toxic misinformation as an excuse not to be vaccinated, and spreading her misinformation further, putting peoples lives at risk?
Just a note, nurses don’t tend to sign an oath, it’s doctors who sign or take the hippocratic oath, nurses have a professional code of conduct that we abide by and clearly this lady did not.
Furthermore as an older nurse who has been in senior positions working with younger uni trained nurses I think it’s a bit of a sweeping generalisation to be stating that younger nurses are not trained as well as we were. I ve known nurses in all age groups and training backgrounds and you get good and bad nurses (and drs) everywhere ( as in most work environments) but the good ones far outweigh the poor ones and can be found over all age groups regardless off how they trained.
Sorry about the long rant, I don’t often comment on here but felt I couldn’t resist some input as it seemed relevant to my own situation xx

If you listen to the BBC podcast with Shemirani's son, Sebastian you'll begin to understand that the anti COVID vaccination conspiracy is just the latest in a long line of previous conspiracy theories. He's grown up being forced to listen to, and take part in, her wacky rants and it was only when he escaped to university that he realised how damaged and damaging his mother is. She counts David Icke amongst her heroes nuff said. The relationship between Shemirani and her son's is irretrievably broken.

AJKW

Everyone is entitled to an opinion or belief. There have been over 1200 deaths associated with the vaccines here in the UK. If this nurse is in a low risk group ie young with no co morbidities then she is perfectly entitled to refuse the vaccine. The mistake she has made is by voicing that opinion, as she is not paid to influence patients with their decision making regarding vaccination.

“over 1200 deaths associated with the vaccines here in the UK” - Care to cite your authority for that statement AJKW?

@Galaxy. There is a difference between expressing an opinion and actively causing harm, so please don’t distort the seriousness of what this woman did by making it a free speech issue because it’s not. She said the most vile things, accusing her colleagues of murder and likening the NHS to the third reich. She also spread unfounded conspiracy theories about Covid and vaccination, knowing full well that as a registered nurse, people are more likely to give weight to her words. She knowingly and deliberately brought her profession into disrepute, which is why she was, deservedly, struck off.

@Shirls52000. Well said. I know it’s off subject, but I picked up on one of your points and echo the sentiment. I have a congenital disability and have been in and out of hospital all my life - am now in my sixties. I have known nurses good and bad, and I don’t think it’s anything to do with training. For some it’s a job, for most it’s a vocation and rather than deteriorating, if anything I think the standard of training and levels of qualification are rising - think nurse practitioners and other specialities which weren’t available to nurses in general in the first decades after the NHS was formed. For too long nurses have been undervalued and I think it’s great that there are now opportunities to expand and grow the role.

The way I see it is vaccine is a personal choice. You either take it or not.
Conspiracy theories are ok if you want to read them or ignore them that's a personal choice too.
But a nurse using her professional status to endorse them as being true deserves to be sacked and struck off. She's not a research scientist, nor does she have any inside knowledge of her ludicrous ramblings. Just promoting her own self importance.

Midwifebi6

theworriedwell.

I have been working in the NHS 42 years 24 of those years in senior positions . Not all nurses who are uni so-called trained are thick but a significant number of them have no bedside manner are unable to communicate effectively with patients and frankly are too far up themselves to be interested in what’s going on around them. There used to be SRNs SENs Auxiliary nurses. The SRNs were the work planners and helped run the wards the SENs were the assistants to the SRNs, the SENs and Auxiliaries were the ones who actually did the more “ hands on are” the SRNs were mainly admin duties / drug rounds / liaison with families / families and consultants. A lot of Uni nurses think they are matrons.

From a patients perspective:
Grandmother dying, in extreme pain, district nurses supposed to call 3 times a day for morphine injection, regularly late one in particular told GM to offer up her suffering to Jesus as a good Christian. Caring professional nurse in the 60s.
3 year old in hospital for surgery, sister refusing to allow mother to stay on the ward, Consultant had to intervene. Caring professional nurse in the 70s. (I was the mother in that scenario.)
Another 3 year old fell and had stitches, nurse in A&E grabbed her on her injured thigh, picked her up and walked off with her, when mother intervened she was told to stay where she was. Caring professional nurse in the 70s. (I was the aunt sitting with mother.)

All 3 of them full of themselves, heartless, and pig ignorant thick.

Me rushed into hospital 2 years ago, put on cardiac ward. Staff wonderful. Patient with dementia up at 2 am causing chaos on the ward. Senior nurse calmed him, persuaded him to go back to bed by offering him a side room. Then she made hot drinks (teas, coffees, hot chocolates) for 24 patients and handed out biscuits. It was like a boarding school midnight feast. She was a brilliant nurse, excellent people skills and very highly trained.

Like I said some of the old timers who can't recognise that there were poor nurses then and now and excellent nurses then and now are just bitter.

Pammie1

@Shirls52000. Well said. I know it’s off subject, but I picked up on one of your points and echo the sentiment. I have a congenital disability and have been in and out of hospital all my life - am now in my sixties. I have known nurses good and bad, and I don’t think it’s anything to do with training. For some it’s a job, for most it’s a vocation and rather than deteriorating, if anything I think the standard of training and levels of qualification are rising - think nurse practitioners and other specialities which weren’t available to nurses in general in the first decades after the NHS was formed. For too long nurses have been undervalued and I think it’s great that there are now opportunities to expand and grow the role.

So true. I have a condition, had seen my GP umpteen times and was told, "It's depression." Well it was only depression in the sense that I was fed up being so unwell. Made another appointment and told only nurse practitioner available so I saw her. She listened to me, said she thought she knew what was wrong and took a blood sample. 24 hrs later her diagnosis confirmed I was on medication for life but feeling better.

Nurse practitioners are amazing in my view, one of the best things, at least at the surgery I attend, is that they get longer appointment times than the doctors so can talk to you and importantly listen. I was so disappointment when she left.

Good for you Shirls, well done. My DDs lovely FiL is a retired senior anaesthetist but he's out there at 70+ doing his bit and putting in the hours to get the population vaccinated. These retired health workers really deserve a lot of recognition. It's freeing up the other medical and other staff to get on with the job of saving lives.

Here in France all pharmacists, retired or otherwise, are being trained to vaccinate.

This nurses views ar heinous. I'm glad she's been struck off and taken down on social media. I feel so sorry for her sons.

There is a doctor in our local little town who has become more and more alternative, insisting on prescribing homeopathic remedies and refusing regular medication. She is now refusing to vaccinate and says it causes Aids! Many of my friends are now leaving her surgery. Thankfully we were not registered with her, but following the retirement of our wonderful doctor we are now with a new Romanian doctor, he has got the vaccination programming in the town swiftly up and running, even working on a Sunday to get the vaccines done. We registered with him about 2 months ago and are already about to get our second vaccines.

Often heard by refusers are the words 'it's my right to choose'. Well their chose and mixing in the community is potentially taking away my right to live.

Quite a few of us who have stalls on the little Saturday market are very annoyed that the local community of alternative hippy types are not wearing masks and kissing and hugging a la francais. It has been brought up in the Mairie but no action taken, not a gendarme in sight. In the much bigger local town the gendarme patrol the market and insist all are wearing masks. The other big market I go to all are wearing masks without of the presence of the gendarme.

Fortunately we live in a rural area where there have been very little cases of Covid, helped by the fact that for the most part the population are adhering to the rules. I think the times we have had to carry an official paper stating times and reasons for being out plus the curfews have really contributed to this.

Shame about the hippy types. Always the few that ruin it for the many.

AJKW

Everyone is entitled to an opinion or belief. There have been over 1200 deaths associated with the vaccines here in the UK. If this nurse is in a low risk group ie young with no co morbidities then she is perfectly entitled to refuse the vaccine. The mistake she has made is by voicing that opinion, as she is not paid to influence patients with their decision making regarding vaccination.

This is not a "young" nurse but a woman in her fifties and from the interview her son gave has a rather long history of believing in conspiracy theories. I also think to toss into the conversation as an idle remark that there have been over 1200 deaths related to the vaccine without all of the data which would relate to those deaths is unwise and precisely the sort of thing which the nervous & anxious will focus on, even on a forum such as this.

May I give a heartfelt thank you Shirls5200 for the stirling work you and your colleagues are doing in vaccinating so many, and in such a short space of time.

When my son had his jab it was done by a senior Orthopaedic Surgeon. He said his time in theatre was restricted so was spending his time as productively as he could. Wonderful how NHS staff have pulled together plus the volunteers.

There is a doctor in our local little town who has become more and more alternative, insisting on prescribing homeopathic remedies and refusing regular medication. She is now refusing to vaccinate and says it causes Aids!

Oh dear, how the scaremongering goes around, Anniefrance!
That conspiracy theory may have arisen because patients undergoing trials for the Australian vaccine showed false positives for HIV. The trials were abandoned.

I think it is a very good thing that she has been struck off. She was in a professional position and abusing that position with nonsensical claims that far too many other people also believe in and being a nurse would give credence to them. By taking this action, the authorities have shown that they will not tolerate it.