What is really going on in politics? Get our daily email briefing straight to your inbox Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Professor Stephen Hawking has hit back at Jeremy Hunt after the Tory health secretary accused him of spreading “pernicious falsehoods” about the NHS.

Hunt launched the astonishing attack on the world renowned scientist last week, over a keynote speech on the NHS he had given at the Royal Society of Medicine.

The health secretary tweeted: “Most pernicious falsehood from Stephen Hawking is idea govt wants US-style insurance system. Is it too much to ask him to look at evidence?”

But in a column for the Guardian today, Professor Hawking said: “Hunt misquoted me, saying that I claimed the Government wants a US-style insurance system. What I said was that the direction is towards a US-style insurance system, run by private companies. The increasing involvement of private health companies in the NHS is evidence for this.”

He accused Hunt of “cherry picking” data to support his argument, arguing that the relatively low increase in private NHS contracts - which rose 0.1% in the last year - was an “anomaly among the data since 2006.”

(Image: AFP)

And he said the reorganisation of NHS England into 44 regions, with the aim of running each as an “accountable care organisation” was a variant of the US system of “health maintenance organisations (HMO).”

He added: “It is reasonable to expect the powerful US HMO companies such as Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth will be bidding for the huge contracts to run these ACOs when they go out to international tender.”

He defended his call for Hunt to stop misrepresenting evidence in his push for a ‘seven-day NHS’. Professor Hawking co-signed a letter last year calling for healthcare policy to be “based on peer-reviewed research and proper evidence.”

Hunt had claimed thousands of patients died unnecessarily because of poor hospital care at weekends.

He noted that Hunt had, by his own admission, dismissed research contradicting his claim, and relied on a single paper - which explicitly warned that “to assume these excess deaths are avoidable would be rash and misleading”.

He added: “As a patient who has spent a lot of time in hospital, I would welcome improved services at the weekend. For this, we need a scientific assessment of the benefits of a seven-day service and of the resources required, not misrepresentation of research.”

In his Twitter outburst last week, Hunt went on to claim the NHS under the Tories had seen record funding.

But the Professor dismissed this as a “distraction”, adding: “Record funding is not the same thing as adequate funding. There is overwhelming evidence that NHS funding and the numbers of doctors and nurses are inadequate.”

He added: “The question is whether democracy can prevail and the public can make its demands for proper funding and public provision undeniable by any government.”