Abandon strikes or risk ‘fragile' NHS recovery, Streeting warns resident doctors
It comes as new data shows the waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has fallen for the second consecutive month to its lowest in more than two years.
However, the number of patients facing the longest waits increased, according to NHS figures.
An estimated 7.36 million treatments were waiting to be carried out in England at the end of May, relating to just under 6.23 million patients – down from 7.39 million treatments and just over 6.23 million patients at the end of April.
These are the lowest figures since March 2023 for treatments and April 2023 for patients.
The number of patients waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment also fell to 1,237 in May from 1,361 in April.
However, some 11,522 people were waiting more than 65 weeks to start treatment, up from 9,258 in the previous month.
The number of patients waiting more than 52 weeks also increased for the second consecutive month – to 196,920, up from 190,068 at the end of April – after falling for 10 months in a row.
Some 2.7% of people on the waiting list for hospital treatment had been waiting more than 52 weeks in May, up from 2.6% in April.
The Government and NHS England have set a target of March 2026 for this figure to be reduced to less than 1%.
Earlier this week, the British Medical Association (BMA) announced resident doctors – formerly junior doctors – in England would walk out for five consecutive days from 7am on July 25.
Mr Streeting said the recovery of the health service 'is only just beginning, and it is fragile'.
'It is only with NHS staff and the Government working together that we can rebuild our NHS so it is there for patients once again,' he said.
'That is why I am once again urging the BMA to abandon their unreasonable rush to strike and work with us to improve resident doctors' working lives instead.'
Health chiefs also warned industrial action would jeopardise 'hard-won progress to cut waiting lists and efforts to see patients quicker'.
Previous strikes by resident doctors have taken place 11 times since 2022, leading to almost 1.5 million appointments being cancelled or rescheduled.
Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: 'These figures show NHS staff are working flat out to deliver more care to patients with waiting lists falling and tests, checks and treatments soaring despite record levels of demand.
'Trust leaders now face the bleak prospect of a full five-day walkout by resident doctors jeopardising this hard-won progress to cut waiting lists and efforts to see patients quicker.
'The focus now will be on planning to ensure services are as safe as possible for patients.'
Elsewhere, data shows 75.5% of patients in England were seen within four hours in A&Es last month, up slightly from 75.4% in May.
The Government and NHS England have set a target of March 2026 for 78% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, discharged or transferred within four hours.
The number of people waiting more than 12 hours in emergency departments from a decision to admit to actually being admitted – so-called 'corridor care' – fell to 38,683 in June, down from 42,891 in May.
The number waiting at least four hours from the decision to admit to admission also fell, standing at 118,171 in June, down from 130,035 in May.
Professor Meghana Pandit, NHS England's co-national medical director (secondary care), said: 'This continued recovery has been a national effort across the health service and it would – of course – be hugely disappointing if this progress were to stall this summer due to industrial action.'
The latest monthly NHS performance figures come a month after the Government unveiled its 10-year plan, which will aim to shift more care from hospitals into the community, with a focus on better use of technology and sickness prevention.
Tim Gardner, assistant director of policy at the Health Foundation, said: 'The NHS is not broken but it is in a critical condition, so the scale of the Government's ambitions are welcome and necessary.
'What we need to see now is concrete action to transform how care is delivered.'
However, Danielle Jefferies, senior analyst at the King's Fund, said: 'The details in the Government's 10-year plan for health are too vague to assess what gradual improvements we will see in data for other important areas like how long we wait in A&E or for an ambulance if someone has a stroke, or for psychological treatments.
'In the coming months and years, the Government will need to be honest with the public over what trade-offs we should expect in the care we receive as it sets about delivering on its planned reforms.
'Potential forthcoming industrial action can also impact patient care across a wide range of services, affecting how long patients wait and our mental and physical health.'
Sarah Scobie, deputy director of research at Nuffield Trust, welcomed progress on waiting lists, but said 'there is an incredibly long way to go' to meet the 18-week target.
She added: 'Another round of resident doctor strikes this summer will inevitably have an impact on patients waiting for treatment and it will be harder for the Government to make headway on its 10-year plan for health while this dispute is rumbling on.'
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Dr Aseem Malhotra is no stranger to controversy. A decade ago, as an NHS clinician, he founded Action on Sugar, a campaign group credited with forcing Public Health England to push for lower levels of sugar in popular products. At the time, he was branded an agent of the 'nanny state', removing packaging that appealed to children and forcing sugar warnings on the public. The cardiologist, 47, has also been a vocal critic of the widespread use of statins – one of the most prescribed medications on the NHS – as a preventative drug to reduce the risk of heart disease. But it is since the outbreak of Covid-19 that he has risen to serious public prominence, first as a proponent of the UK government's vaccine rollout, then as one of its fiercest critics. He has repeatedly claimed that the mRNA vaccines developed during the pandemic did 'more harm than good' and called for them to be suspended. Now he has a new role which gives him a huge influence over global health policy. 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The clinic has a sci-fi feel to it, with its array of futuristic-looking machines, including hyperbaric oxygen and cryo chambers, designed to offer members paying £300 a month drug-free 'hacks' for their health. Wearing a loose, pale blue linen shirt, shorts and trainers, Malhotra has some patches of psoriasis on his skin which he suspects are from 'vaccine injury' and tells me that he has consulted a leading doctor in the US about them. Malhotra first came to the attention of RFK Jr in September 2022, after he published a paper on 'misinformation about the Covid mRNA vaccine' in the Journal of Insulin Resistance. It led to him being interviewed on television. 'I walked out of the GB News studio and the first person to call me was Robert Kennedy Jr,' he recalls. 'And he said, 'Dr Malhotra, it's Robert Kennedy Jr here. I want to thank you for your courage.'' RFK Jr announced he was running for president in April 2023, and built his campaign on a promise to curb ultra-processed food, scrutinise vaccines and encourage clean living, but he is a divisive figure in the world of health policy, not least for his previous support for claims that childhood vaccines can cause autism and that fluoride in the water can damage IQ. Malhotra is one of his strongest defenders, and believes he may have been the first to suggest the former Democrat ran for president – following in the footsteps of his father, Bobby Kennedy, and uncle, JFK. 'I was very impressed with him, despite media reports of him being some sort of extremist in terms of his rhetoric and his advocacy on the issue of childhood vaccines,' Malhotra says. 'He almost had that presidential demeanour, in the sense that he had a presence. He was extremely articulate. He came across to me as having very high integrity, being compassionate and being a good listener. 'I said, 'He's the right guy at the right time. We need someone like him, to restore integrity into politics.'' 'Trust in doctors is at an all-time low,' he continues. He believes that the medical industry has been hopelessly captured by big corporate pharmaceutical companies, which he claims fund biased research into the safety of their own drugs and push patients into taking them. 'Medicine has become an illusion. It's been hijacked by these powerful commercial entities because they control the information that doctors utilise to make clinical decisions.' Malhotra believes that RFK Jr is already having a serious impact on the Trump administration and pushing the president himself away from pharmaceutical corporations. 'President Trump clearly has become more and more aware that the big corporations have abused their power and are undermining democracy – big pharma in particular,' he says. On RFK Jr's more contentious views, he is willing to give the health secretary a chance to assess the evidence for his claims again. 'He may not get everything right, but he's open to changing his mind and opinion when he hears new evidence,' Malhotra says, adding that he, too, believes the widely-debunked link between vaccines and autism should be re-examined. 'If you'd asked me even three years ago, four years ago, 'Dr Malhotra, do you think there's anything between vaccines and autism?' I'd have said: 'Absolute nonsense, that's been debunked'. 'But what the Covid vaccine has exposed is that there's been a holy grail, if you like, on traditional vaccines. Now, I think we have to start from the perspective that no drug or vaccine is completely safe.' His view that every current vaccine should be completely reassessed for safety, he acknowledges, is far from mainstream in the UK. But he says it forms part of a growing chorus of medical professionals who reject the influence of big pharma in their industry. So how did an NHS cardiologist, seen by some as a misinformation merchant, become a MAHA icon? His life story gives some clues to his surprising trajectory. Born in New Delhi, he moved to the UK as a child with his doctor parents Anisha Malhotra and Kailash Chand. Dr Chand was a darling of the New Labour years and a prolific campaigner for the NHS. In 2012, he became deputy president of the British Medical Association and, the same year, received a national merit award from Labour leader Ed Miliband. A young Aseem attended Manchester Grammar School, where he batted first on the cricket team. His middle-school report card praised a 'courageous, committed and able' young man, 'with a sense of justice that does him proud'. A 1994 article he wrote for the school newspaper aged 16 warned that the British National Party was 'just the tip of the iceberg' for discrimination in the UK and that 'racism is in each and every one of us'. 'It is institutional racism which has to be opposed with all our might,' he wrote, suggesting an early interest in the failure of public bodies that would stay with him until middle age. His interest in cardiology began even earlier in life when his older brother Amit, who had Down's syndrome, died of heart failure in 1988 aged 13. 'He had a viral illness that caused him to go into crashing heart failure within five days of being well,' he recalls. Did his brother's death inspire him to work on heart conditions as an adult? 'Absolutely, yes,' he replies. The aspiring doctor then studied medicine at Edinburgh University, before working in a variety of UK hospitals and becoming a cardiology specialist registrar at the Royal Free and Harefield hospitals in London. After the outbreak of the pandemic, in February 2021 he appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain to promote the Covid vaccine for elderly people, saying, 'We need to understand where this vaccine hesitancy is coming from,' that 'trust needs to be restored' and that the 'vaccines by far are the safest'. But a few months later, following the death of his father soon after receiving the vaccine, he had a sudden change of heart. 'When my dad died and had a cardiac arrest, someone tweeted, 'It's the vax!',' he remembers. 'I got so angry. I blocked them and thought, 'This person is crazy and they are mad'.' 'And then, when I spent nine months looking at all the data, and reaching out to other people who have more expertise in particular areas, like immunology, it became very clear that this is what happened.' As a trained cardiologist, Malhotra says he believes two 'critical narrowings' in his father's heart, discovered in the post-mortem, were caused by taking the vaccine. Although there was no concrete evidence that his father's death was caused by receiving a Covid vaccine, he believes it is the only explanation for the quick death of an otherwise healthy man. The conclusion, meanwhile, of the largest study of vaccine safety so far conducted, which included research on side effects among 99 million people and was published in the respected journal Vaccine in February 2024, found the presence of several conditions linked to the jabs but judged that they were extremely rare. 'I think it's time for a 'just say no' campaign,' says Malhotra. 'We have seen the worst failures of the system in health with the rollout of the Covid vaccine, which has been absolutely catastrophic in terms of the harm it's done.' The decision to reject the consensus view on vaccines, including from the British and American health authorities, has sometimes made his life more difficult. Two years ago, a group of doctors attempted to have his medical licence revoked, alleging that he had spread misinformation about Covid-19. The General Medical Council initially took no action, then announced in February last year that it would review that decision, after a legal challenge from one of the complainants. The review is on-going. 'I don't think these people are ill-intentioned. I just think that they are acting from a place of fear,' he says. Further controversy came after an interview about statins on the BBC in January 2023, which he used to call for the suspension of the Covid vaccine rollout while the link between the jab and excess deaths was investigated. The BBC was forced to apologise and said the claims should have been challenged. A divorcee, he separated from his wife of five years, Sukriti, in 2010 – Malhotra has no children and lives a solitary lifestyle in Hampstead, waking at 4.30am each day to meditate and read before working out, working until around 5pm, then switching off his phone two hours before going to bed at 8.30pm. 'I'm obsessed with my own health, in the sense that I want to always be the best version of myself, physically and mentally, but also so I can teach others and help others.' 'I consider myself an athlete,' he says, revealing that he has been using the cryo chamber in his office to treat a shoulder injury from the gym. He never eats sugar or starch, other than in porridge, and prefers a high-protein diet of Mediterranean and Indian food with at least 10 varieties of fruit and vegetables a day. The latest target of his campaigning is against Labour's drive to provide weight-loss jabs on the NHS, which he says will be a 'total, complete public health disaster' that he compares to telling patients: 'I'm going to give you cancer as a way for you to lose weight.' 'Inevitably, the safety and benefits are grossly exaggerated, which means there's no informed consent,' he says. 'And we are now seeing that these particular weight-loss drugs are not good for your health, because you lose equal amounts of muscle as you do body fat with the jabs.' There is some evidence that weight-loss medications can result in patients losing muscle mass, but studies have found the quantity is lower than the amount of lost fat. Malhotra says that obesity is a 'marker for other health problems' including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, and that weight-loss jabs only target the symptom, not the root cause. 'As far as I'm concerned, until we have independent evidence showing that weight-loss drugs can actually improve those outcomes, it shouldn't be given to a single human being,' he says. And Malhotra is hopeful that there may be an opportunity for him to use his solutions to the health crisis in the UK; he believes that Nigel Farage may be the answer. 'I do think Nigel is a very courageous politician,' he says. 'He's not afraid to speak his mind.' There is talk in Reform circles, given Farage's popularity with Trump's team, that Malhotra will address the party's annual conference in Birmingham this autumn. He has also been appointed as chief health adviser to Action on World Health, an anti-WHO campaign group co-founded by Farage. But for now his focus is firmly on the US. Today, he admits that initially he was 'maybe a bit sceptical' when he first heard from one of RFK Jr's aides that he was intending to suspend his presidential campaign and join Trump, who is known for his love of big corporations and – critically – McDonald's. 'Once he decided he was going to do that, then I made the decision that I was going to support Trump winning the presidential election,' he adds. 'I felt that, you know, irrespective of Trump being a divisive character, I think he is a disrupter, and it's the kind of disrupter that we need right now in politics.' However, he says it was scepticism from the American public towards the same vaccine that Trump rolled out during his first term that helped propel him back into office last November. 'My view is the primary reason that President Trump had such a clear margin of victory over Kamala Harris was because of Robert Kennedy Jr joining him,' he says. 'The main issue that most people were worried about and cared about in the US was the whole handling, and the mandating, and the lack of addressing the problem with the Covid vaccine.' That claim does not appear to be backed up by the most commonly-cited US polls, which showed that concerns about the cost of living and immigration were the greatest concerns of voters during the campaign. Malhotra also claims that 57 per cent of Americans felt that excess deaths during the pandemic were linked to the vaccine, 'because they knew of a family member or a friend that had been severely affected by it'. He cannot provide a reference to that survey, but a poll published last year found that around 28 per cent of Americans believe vaccines caused a higher death toll. Malhotra attributes that shift to the rise of alternative media, such as the shows presented by Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, on which he has often appeared. Later this month, he will travel to Washington DC for a fundraiser for RFK Jr, when he says he plans to speak to him about health policy. He will continue living in the UK, for now. But despite their working relationship, there are clear political differences between the clean-living doctor and the Trump administration's health chief. His critique of big pharma companies is shared by some in Trump world, but he also has a wider agenda to increase the role of the state in people's lives to boost wider health outcomes. At a health policy summit in Texas in May, Malhotra, who shares the same paternalistic values as his father, a lifelong liberal, argued that to solve the US's health problems the government must go far beyond what RFK Jr and his team have so far proposed on regulating food and drugs, including a planned ban on food dye and a war on seed oils. And he has claimed he is already in 'active discussions' with senior MAHA officials about how to drive a more aggressive agenda. At the summit, he spoke about his vision of how to get America healthy, promoting a radical Scandinavian-style approach to health that would include raising the minimum wage, providing more affordable housing and improving educational outcomes. 'Modern medicine actually has relatively little role to play in terms of your health,' he says, arguing that 'maybe 10 per cent of life expectancy or health is determined by what your doctor prescribes for you in the hospital or in the clinic'. Instead, he says socially determined factors – the 'conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age' – are the greatest contributors to overall health. 'If you are somebody who is in a low-pay, low-control, high-demand job, that, in a way, is effectively a death sentence in terms of the chronic stress it exerts,' he says. 'That paradigm shift needs to happen. If we don't sort out the mind in terms of everything, in terms of our culture, how we interact with each other… then we can't optimise our physical health.' If anything, he says the association between his scepticism of Covid vaccines and Right-wing politics is more about the people who accepted his views after the death of his father. 'When I started speaking out on my U-turn on the whole issue of the Covid vaccine, the people that were the most supportive of me were actually people who I wouldn't normally find myself being aligned with or having conversations with,' he says. Some of his earliest supporters included Ron Johnson, the Republican senator who used his position as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee to invite witnesses who were critical of the vaccines. It is clear that an uneasy coalition exists between members of the American Right and those like RFK Jr with fringe views on public health – who are unlikely to agree on many of the long-term solutions to the issues they diagnose. The next year will reveal what influence Malhotra really has, and whether this British cardiologist is the man to help turn America's health around. In the meantime, he thinks a 'shift' of public opinion is under way. 'Seeing what's happened in America, I think, will give hope to other politicians that have been a bit afraid to speak about these issues to speak up,' he says. 'We are living through a corporate tyranny. And I think once that is understood and acknowledged and collectively, we can fight it.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
