Stephen Hawking: I'm worried about the future of the NHS

[SwissTony]

3. That a-hole Hunt is pissed off because he's been shown to be a liar

In his speech, Hawking will single out Hunt, who claimed that 11,000 patients a year died because of understaffing of hospitals at weekends. He will say that four of the eight studies cited by the health secretary were not peer-reviewed and that he ignored 13 papers that contradicted his statements.

“Speaking as a scientist, cherrypicking evidence is unacceptable. When public figures abuse scientific argument, citing some studies but suppressing others, to justify policies that they want to implement for other reasons, it debases scientific culture,” Hawking will say.

Dr Lauren Gavaghan, a consultant psychiatrist‏ whose speech about the junior doctors dispute on James O’Brien’s LBC radio show last year went viral, told the Guardian that Hunt “purposefully misinterpreted statistics from a faulty paper around NHS weekend deaths, when the authors explicitly said that to use the figures would be ‘rash and misleading’. As a consequence of this, sick people did not seek medical help at weekends.

“Subsequent research has shown his ‘analysis’ to be wrong, yet the harm has unfortunately already been done. For Jeremy Hunt to now have the audacity to dispute Professor Stephen Hawking, arguably the world’s most brilliant mind and a man who has dedicated his life to the complex analysis of data, on the interpretation of these academic papers is quite simply laughable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/aug/19/jeremy-hunt-says-stephen-hawking-is-wrong-on-the-nhs