Anti-vaxx nurse struck off

EllanVannin

Nurses have to sign an oath before beginning their job---I remember having to, so any form of misconduct gets you an immediate dismissal.

Well you don’t actually have to sign an oath but you are expected to uphold professional standards.

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Like many others posting here I'm appalled that a person in a position like this could use her professional influence to spread dangerous misinformation. I am very relieved to hear that the NMC have protected the public from someone clearly unable to understand the concept of evidence based practice. As nurses we have a responsibility to give the best possible advice, we are degree level practitioners who are taught to question and examine the best information available to benefit our patients. This woman has her own selfish and stupid agenda. Good riddance.

The reason there has been no debate effalump has been because faced with a pandemic caused by a new virus whose properties were unknown, most people felt the measures taken, broadly, were sensible and proportionate to the threat.

The fact that those who have objected have had the freedom to say so and have said so frequently shows that there has been plenty of debate on the issue.

I am sure if in 1938 someone had told Londoners that within 2 years the whole of docklands would be completely destroyed and vast swathes of housing all round them would also be completely and totally destroyed, they would have been very doubtful and would have questioned it. I am not sure anyone forsaw the horrors of trench warfare in 1912.

We cannot foresee the future and what it might bring and some of the things it brings are often unbelievable until they happen.

In 2009, nursing became an all degree profession. In 2005 -6 only 4% of nurses in the UK were educated to degree level. 24% of nursing students drop out without finishing their degree.

Maybe as a health professional she knows something the governments are not telling us. If someone had said to you two years ago that within months, we will all be in lockdown and not allowed to mix with people. That we would have to wear masks and stay 2 mentres away from others. Would you have accepted that and said "Yes, OK no probs."? Would you not even question it? Have you ever wondered by there has been no debate whatsoever during all of this?

MamieJan... ???

Mawbe.. That's dreadful. That nurse sounds deranged.

everyone is entitled to their opinion but this is not about her holding those views but expressing those views. She has told people not to have the vaccine - the opposite of her employer. it would be similar to going into a supermarket and telling people not to buy the food as it is dangerous. Would Tesco still employ its staff if they were telling people to go to Sainsbury as Tesco food was bad and killing people? .

As a health care professional you are quite entitled to an ‘opinion’ but shouldn’t be promoting this publicly as it is potentially very damaging to public health, lots of people will trust in this persons ‘opinion’ because she is a nurse - therefore he/she/ they are dangerous

As an old NHS nurse (not now on the frontline), I agree! So sad that there are people espousing these lies, but sadly there are bad apples in every profession and group as we have seen by some high profile cases over past years

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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?

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.

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

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