TOP children’s doctor and TV personality Ravi Jayaram has warned against mob mentality and urged people to put the best interests of the child first in the Alfie Evans case.

Hundreds of people staged a protest outside Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool last night where the terminally ill toddler is being cared for.

It came after a date to switch off Alfie’s life support was set by a High Court judge following a legal battle.

Dr Jayaram, a consultant paediatrician at the Countess of Chester Hospital, yesterday wrote on Facebook that he was shocked by some of the abuse levelled at hospital staff.

He said: “I’m sorry to have to spout off but this is wrong on so many levels.

“The ill-informed leading on the ignorant egged on by social media. Some of the comments are terrifying. Do these people genuinely think that children’s doctors and nurses are deliberately lying and going out of their way to do harm? How the hell has it come to this in 2018?”

He added: “Remember that the best interests and well-being of the child are paramount, not the doctors, not the nurses, not even the family and certainly not the baying mob.

“And prolonging suffering with no prospect of recovery is just ethically and morally wrong.”

Alfie’s parents, Tom Evans and Kate James, from Liverpool, have lost fights in the high court, court of appeal, supreme court and European court of human rights (ECHR).

They say “the state” is wrongly interfering with their parental choice and want to move their 23-month-old son to a hospital in Rome for further treatment.

Born on 9 May 2016, Alfie is said to be in a “semi-vegetative state” and has a degenerative neurological condition.

Specialists at Alder Hey say life-support treatment should stop and judges have accepted evidence that shows further treatment would be futile.

In his post, Dr Jayaram, who presented Channel 4’s ‘Born Naughty’, said: “My sympathies lie with Alfie and his family as no parent would ever want to be in a situation where they have to admit that there is no hope of improvement.

“My sympathies lie with the hard working and dedicated staff at Alder Hey who are doing their best 24/7 in spite of the vitriol and bile being hurled at them.

“I have no sympathy at all for the mob jumping on the bandwagon and behaving like some kind of 17th century witch-hunting lynch mob. You’re just taking advantage of a family’s grief and not allowing them to have any kind of opportunity for moving on with the process of grieving.

“I’m fully prepared for abuse to be hurled back at me by saying this in public but it needs to be said.”