On Monday evening, Nigel Farage reacted to the claims by a senior doctor that around 300 to 500 people are dying each week due to delays in emergency care. Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine warned that the healthcare system could not continue the way it was, stating it was “unsafe” and “undignified”.
On GB News, Nigel Farage said: “I wish I could sit here tonight and say ‘it’s 2023, it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be so good’ and yet I’m gonna be honest with you, I don’t see a whole lot to be optimistic about.”
He added: “I don’t want to sit here every night just whinging about what’s going wrong, I want to try and find over the course of the next few weeks and months some positive solutions to the problem.
“Well let’s begin the first show of 2023 with a very sobering statistic.”
The former politician claims that statistics from the Office for National Statistics have revealed that excess deaths on average are around 1000 a week.
He said: “Over the course of six months and more, on average, every single week a thousand people more are dying than statistically, we would expect for the age and health of our population. “
On the National Statistics website, the latest figures from the week ending December 9 2022 say registered deaths that week were 13, 341 which was 6.5 percent above the five-year average, which would be 810 excess deaths that week.
Nigel Farage continued: “There was an extraordinary statement that came yesterday from the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, who told Times Radio that he thinks between 300 and 500 people a week are dying as a result of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care.”
The GB News show host said the claim was linked to the “number of absolute horror stories” heard about the current healthcare system.
He said: “People in their 90s being made to wait 18 to 20 hours on trollies sitting on chairs, probably in many cases not even offered a glass of water.
“We have to be frank about just how bad our problems are, so I thought to myself ‘well maybe if Dr Adrian Boyle is right, if three to five hundred people a week are dying unnecessarily because A&E doesn’t work anymore, maybe that helps to begin to explain these excess deaths of 1000 people.”
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Nigel Farage spoke with his news show guest James Freeman, who previously worked at the Office for National Statistics and is a former MEP, about the number of excess deaths.
James Freeman called the statistic “quite sobering” and said there had been an increase in heart-related deaths in young men and women.
He said: “So basically, we’ve got excess deaths on average around a 1000 a week, it comes out around ten percent give or take a few percentages and this is consistent week after week since May so it’s been going on for a long time now, something is going on there that poses a question.”
“This isn’t just an anomaly, this is something that’s happening. We had the British Heart Foundation before Christmas who was putting it down to delays in ambulance times.
“I mean, that’s all very well but it doesn’t explain why people of that age group…are having heart attacks in the first place.”
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One explanation may come from Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England and the official medical advisor for the Goverment, who has warned ministers that thousands of middle age people are dying of heart conditions due to not receiving statins or blood pressure medicines during the pandemic.
He has expressed concern about the higher number of deaths than normal this year from preventable conditions and said it may be due to people continuing to stay away from their GPs unless it is an emergency like in the pandemic.
Sonya Babu-Narayan, from the British Heart Foundation, expressed similar concerns and said: “The longer a heart patient waits for treatment, the more likely it is that their condition could worsen . . . and because people have not had the check-ups they would routinely have before the pandemic, many remain unaware that they have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, putting them at a greater risk of early death from a heart attack or stroke.”
However, James Freeman criticised the senior doctor’s claim on GB News claimed said younger people do not regularly go for checkups and said: “You can’t explain a thousand a week from that, it’s ridiculous, to be honest, it’s an insult to our intelligence.”
