“While it is still important to abide by social distancing, data from Public Health England show that the UK Vaccine Programme has been a success” Michael Fabricant says.

“The latest data show that in Staffordshire – and reflected elsewhere – for the last 12 out of 13 weeks for which data are available, the number of deaths has been substantially lower than the 5 year average before Covid.  Fewer people are dying than normal. So while I understand that the Government does not want to stop publishing daily Covid death and infection rates because people may think the Government is hiding something, I have suggested to the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, that deaths through other causes should be published too to put this all in context.

“The Government is having to make tough decisions about whether or not to free up people’s lives and while this is not helped by the Opposition parties parroting ‘reckless’, it would be helpful if the public had a better idea of the context of the daily death rate.  Every day people die from communicable diseases like viral pneumonia and influenza and we take it as a fact of life – or death.

“When 400 years ago the Spanish Conquistadors invaded South America, they killed more native Americans through disease than by conquest.  Illneses like measles were killers because natives had built up no resistance to this ‘new’ disease.  This is similar to today.  The Covid vaccines are building up our antibody and T cell resistance so I hope that in the months to come, catching Covid will become at worst an unpleasant illness like measles and not necessarily a killer.”