The boyfriend of a brilliant Cambridge graduate who died of cancer after refusing conventional medical treatment has told how he believes her conspiracy theorist mother misled her with a ‘whirlwind of fake information’.
Paloma Shemirani died after turning down chemotherapy, which would have given her an 80 percent chance of survival, and instead took ineffectual enemas and juices, her boyfriend Ander Harris says.
Ander believes his girlfriend, who was also a beauty queen, was inappropriately influenced against conventional medicine by her mother, notorious anti-vaxxer Kate Shemirani.
Ander made the comments on the BBC’s Panorama in which Paloma’s brothers, Gabriel and Sebastian Shemirani, also claimed their mother’s conspiracy theories were heavily linked to their sister’s death from blood cancer last year.
Paloma’s mother, Ms Shemirani, who calls herself a ‘nurse’ despite being banned from the profession for sharing misinformation online, has since furiously fired back at her sons’ claims that she is responsible for her death.
In a post on X, she claims her daughter was ‘gaslit’ by doctors and has even suggested she was experimented on by medics, accusing doctors of breaching the Nuremberg Code drawn up in 1947 to control the safety of medical experiments.
It was late 2023, not long after graduating from Cambridge University, when Paloma, 23, started suffering chest pains and breathing difficulties.
Ander accompanied her to Maidstone Hospital on December 22 that year and she was later given the diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which left untreated can be fatal but with chemotherapy she was likely to survive.
Ander Harris, Paloma Shemirani’s boyfriend, (pictured) believes the brilliant Cambridge graduate, who died of cancer, was misled by her conspiracy theorist mother
Straight-A student Paloma Shemirani died of cancer last year – coerced into refusing mainstream cancer treatment, her brothers also believe
Ander believes Paloma, who died after turning down chemotherapy, was misled by her mother Kate Shemirani (pictured) who he believes fed her a ‘whirlwind of fake information’
Recalling the moment that Paloma revealed the diagnosis to him, he told the BBC: ‘I remember when she called me at three in the morning, woke me up in bed, and she was just crying.
‘And she said “There’s a mass in my chest that they found on an X-ray”.
‘Obviously I was terrified. Cancer was one of Paloma’s biggest worries in the whole world.’
Though their relationship had previously been strained, Paloma still craved the support of her mother, Ander said – and she soon turned up at the hospital and began to exert control over Paloma.
Ander, 23, said that everything was ‘up in the air’ for Paloma when she was first diagnosed and ‘she wanted to assess all her [medical] options’.
But he continued: ‘Kate came in and started asking for her blood work and everything. She didn’t ask Paloma’s permission, she said it and insisted on it and the nurses kind of looked over at Paloma (as if to ask) ‘are you ok with this? She was like, you know, “yeah sure”… (she was) defeated.’
Panorma’s Cancer Conspiracy Theories: Why Did Our Sister Die? – screened on Monday night – claimed Shemirani texted Ander to say: ‘TELL PALOMA NOT TO SIGN [OR] VERBALLY CONSENT TO CHEMO OR ANY TREATMENT.’
He raised safeguarding concerns with medical staff who he says were also worried about parental influence but thought Paloma had the capacity to make her own decisions.
But Kate has since issued a furious riposte to the claims, and says doctors, coroners and even the media are responsible for suppressing ‘medical negligence’
Paloma’s brothers Gabriel (left) and Sebastian Shemirani (right) have also claimed their mother’s conspiracy theories were heavily linked to their sister’s death from blood cancer
Panorama’s Cancer Conspiracy Theories show claimed Paloma’s mother, Kate Shemirani, text Ander the above message
Text messages between Ander and his former Cambridge graduate girlfriend Paloma Shemirani
Beauty queen Paloma first started experiencing chest pains and breathing difficulties shortly after graduating Cambridge University in 2023, it later emerged she had non-Hogkin lymphoma, and would have likely survived with chemotherapy treatment
Asked whether his former girlfriend was able to make informed decisions, Ander replied: ‘No not at all, she was in fight or flight and really just wanted to be taken care of and not have to make the hard decisions.
‘Her mum kind of swooped in and I could see how much she was torn and it was just this whirlwind of fake information and she didn’t know up from down.’
Paloma did not agree to chemotherapy and instead reached out to a former partner of Shemirani’s, who told her to consider Gerson therapy – a theory that a plant-based diet and routine of coffee enemas could treat cancer – that medical experts say has no evidential basis.
Ander said: ‘Paloma was having to spend hours and hours a day doing these enemas and juices on this very specific schedule and it took all her time. She had no energy at all. Of course she wasn’t eating, had cancer…so it was awful for her.’
Shemirani’s influence over her daughter isolated her from other members of her family, her friends and boyfriend, the programme alleged.
In March 2024, Paloma ended her relationship with Ander who said: ‘We were kind of just pushed onto the outside. I could see it happening, I could see her being pulled away from me but I couldn’t do anything about it.’
Four months after splitting from Ander, Paloma suffered a fatal heart attack caused by her tumour. She had been taken to hospital in Brighton but after several days her life support was switched off.
Ander said: ‘I just broke. I was just screaming and crying at the top of my lungs. It was horrible.
She had been a beauty queen, competing in the Miss Brighton and Miss Universe Great Britain competitions
Kate Shemirani (pictured with Piers Corbyn at an anti-lockdown rally in August 2020) has been held responsible for her daughter’s death by her own sons
She has fired back furiously on what she labelled ‘defamatory reporting’ of her daughter’s death, including a written statement seemingly signed by Paloma
Kate Shemirani continues to share conspiracy theories online to this day (pictured in 2020 with Piers Corbyn at a Trafalgar Square anti-lockdown rally)
‘She could really, really make me laugh like no one else and that’s what I miss most.’
Paying tribute, he said: ‘We were only 19 when we met. She made me want to be a better person.
‘She was fantastic – one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Always smiling, always happy she was the love of my life.’
Paloma, who was pictured beaming with her two A* and A results after finishing school, had aspired to embark on a career in publishing but her life was cut tragically short due to, her brothers allege, undue influence from their mother, who rose to notoriety during the coronavirus pandemic.
Shemirani continues to call herself a ‘natural nurse’ despite being struck off the UK’s nursing register in 2021 for her extreme anti-medicine views.
She made headlines during the pandemic when she used social media to claim Covid vaccines had ‘a tiny bit of Satan’ inside, the jabs caused cancer and contained material harvested from aborted foetuses.
She also claimed the Covid virus was linked to the roll-out of 5G technology, and a political tool to gain access to and change people’s DNA. She likened lockdown to the Holocaust and insisted dancing NHS nurses would ‘stand trial for genocide’, while also branding vaccination teams ‘death squads’.
Speaking to the Panorama her sons said they had been estranged from their mother but Paloma had kept in touch with her. They were not told of their sister’s death until a few days afterwards via their lawyer who had been helping them with an assessment of the appropriate medical treatment for Paloma.
Paloma Shemirani was a Cambridge graduate who had her sights set on a career in publishing, according to an online CV
Ander had raised safeguarding concerns with medical staff about Kate Shemirani’s influence on her daughter, but they believed she had the capacity to make her own decisions
Sebastian said: ‘My sister has passed away as a direct consequence of my mum’s actions and beliefs and I don’t want anyone else to go through the same pain or loss that I have.’
Gabriel – who was Paloma’s twin-brother – added: ‘I wasn’t able to stop my sister from dying. But it would mean the world to me if I could make it that she wasn’t just another in a long line of people that die in this way.’
The brothers said that when growing up in the East Sussex town of Uckfield, the WIFI was switched off at home because it was deemed harmful and their mother and father, Faramarz Shemirani, would regale them with wild conspiracy theories like the Royal Family were shape-shifting lizards and that the Rothschilds are planning to go live on a space station after a mass genocide on earth.
Shemirani- who was banned from Twitter but returned when it was rebranded as X under Elon Musk – is said to have briefly worked for the NHS as a nurse in the 1980s before working as a British Airways air hostess and model and administering Botox, fillers and peels while bringing up her children.
She now shares her extremist views on the NHS, immigration and vaccines with her 81,000 followers – and conspiracy theories were a common soundtrack on the school run, including those perpetuated by misinformation spreader Alex Jones, who was declared bankrupt after being told to pay $1.5billion to victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in the US, which he claimed had been staged to tighten up American gun laws.
In 2012, Shemirani was diagnosed with breast cancer – and had the tumour removed through surgery, undergoing a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
But online, she appears to suggest she was healed following ‘Gerson therapy’ and by taking vitamin and mistletoe injections.
‘I’m still here and thriving. You can shove your poison mustard gas where the sun doesn’t shine you pimps and assassins,’ she wrote on X earlier this year, in reference to chemotherapy.
Paloma later suffered a fatal heart attack caused by her tumour, with her life support switched off after several days. An inquest is set to begin into her death next month
Shemirani’s former partner has told the BBC that any ‘assertions that I played a role in her death are legally inaccurate’.
Shemirani herself declined to comment when approached by the MailOnline but has continued to post about her daughter’s death on social media for the last year.
She claims that the NHS killed her daughter ‘in the name of medicine and cash for corpses’, without evidence, and continues fundraising in her daughter’s name for legal fees that she says will be used to challenge the NHS in court.
Writing on X earlier this week, she said: ‘When the time is ready we will put all of the documents in public but what I can say is that my daughter was given 12 times the dose of adrenaline and other drugs that did the same as the adrenaline.
‘It destroyed her brain in front of us as it collapsed her circulation and the rest is just a cover-up.’
In a document co-authored with her ex-husband, she said that Paloma’s ‘petite frame (was) subjected to excessive dosing…that caused irreversible brain damage’.
She also writes about Paloma on her website, where she sells branded vitamin supplements and offers one-to-one consultations for around £195, despite being banned from practising nursing in the UK.
Calling yourself a nurse without good reason is not currently a criminal offence – but will change in the near future under government plans to make falsely identifying as a nurse a crime.
Health secretary Wes Streeting said of the proposals: ‘This new legislation will help crack down on bogus beauticians and conspiracy theorists masquerading as nurses, and those attempting to mislead patients.’
In its announcement of the proposed legislation last month, the government directly alluded to Shemirani without naming her, referencing an incident in which she appeared to compare NHS bosses to the Nazis in 2021 , labelling her a ‘bogus nurse’.
Speaking at the anti-lockdown rally in question, she had referenced the Nuremberg Trials, in which seven physicians affiliated with the Nazis were put to death for their roles in the Holocaust and crimes against humanity.
She told an anti-lockdown gathering: ‘At the Nuremberg trials, the doctors and nurses, they stood trial, and they hung. If you are a doctor or a nurse, now is the time to get off that bus.’
Police said at the time they were investigating the comments, with both London mayor Sadiq Khan and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemning her tirade.
An inquest into Paloma’s death is due to begin next month.
