Marianna in Conspiracyland 2: 5. A collective immune system
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BBC
4.0 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Can people fight back against medical misinformation? In the months after Paloma’s death, her brothers say they want to prevent other deaths, and they believe social media companies should take stronger action against medical misinformation. Meanwhile her Mum, Kate Shemirani, takes to social media to share a different account of her death. She has promoted a range of unproven theories on social media and podcasts about how Paloma was murdered by medical staff. The BBC has not seen evidence to support this. The BBC’s social media investigations correspondent Marianna Spring interrogates whether and how some politicians and social media companies are emboldening anti-medicine conspiracy theorists, and speaks to a former cancer surgeon and patient trying to bust cancer myths online.
Host: Marianna Spring Producer: Anna Harris Sound Engineer: Tony Churnside Editor: Sam Bonham Commissioning producer: Nathan Jones Commissioning editor: Rhian Roberts
This was a BBC collaboration with Panorama.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A group of men ran in with machetes. |
| 0:03.8 | I'm Livy Haydock, and from BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 5 Live, |
| 0:08.6 | this is gangster, the story of Georgie Pye. |
| 0:13.2 | The scene of the killing near a Chinese bookshop is being flooded with detectives. |
| 0:17.0 | Welcome to the world of the triads. |
| 0:19.6 | If the triads are coming out of you, you're done. |
| 0:21.5 | Where loyalty is sworn in blood. Gangster, the story of Georgie Pye. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.4 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. You don't think rationally when you have cancer because suddenly nothing is logical. |
| 0:40.3 | You want to live. You feel you will do anything you can to be that one person to be cured. |
| 0:44.9 | This is Lizzo Reardon. She used to work as a surgeon who treated patients with breast cancer. |
| 0:50.8 | And then 10 years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. |
| 0:55.0 | The first thing I thought when I was diagnosed is I'm going to be dead in 10 years, |
| 0:59.0 | and that's mainly as a surgeon I knew my own statistics. |
| 1:01.0 | Liz tells me that her experience changed the way she understood her patients. |
| 1:06.0 | I used to tell patients, don't Google. |
| 1:08.0 | There's a lot of scary shit out there. |
| 1:10.0 | Here's a load of leaflets you're |
| 1:11.0 | never going to read off you go. And it's ridiculous because it's the first thing I did. When Liz |
| 1:15.1 | searched online after her diagnosis, she was taken aback by what she found. And I suddenly |
| 1:20.8 | entered this whole new world of social media. People were sending me videos and messages, have you |
| 1:25.9 | heard about this? Have you heard about that? |
| 1:33.7 | Aslis descended deeper into conspiracy land, she decided to do research into what was happening to people. And she came across cases of other cancer patients who she says were harmed because |
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