 The chairman of the British Medical Association, Hamish Meldrum, said he was dismayed by the "jaw-droppingly untruthful attacks" made by American critics.The chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), told "The Guardian" newspaper that "it is neither true, nor is it anything you could extrapolate from anything we've ever recommended" that Kennedy would be denied treatment by the NHS.The business journal "Investor's Business Daily" claimed mathematician and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who had ALS and spoke with the aid of an American-accented voice synthesizer, would not have survived if he had been treated in the British National Health Service.