Response to Michael Fabricant's comments

Michael Fabricant MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

By email: [email protected]

Dear Mr. Fabricant,

I’m writing on behalf of over 20,000 members at the Institute of Biomedical Science to formally complain about your comments in yesterday’s media. As a public figure, you should know better than to make such damaging and disparaging remarks.

Our hospital laboratory staff (who are still at the forefront of the pandemic response) feel angry and undermined by your dismissals of the Prime Minister’s illegal behaviour. Like the teachers you allude to, they have been taking life-threatening risks just to do their jobs. Throughout the pandemic, they have acted with great professionalism, many have lost friends, family or colleagues, and their observation of the laws under lockdown reflected their understanding of the science and the greater good.

After working long shifts in understaffed environments where the workload pressures were unrelenting, our Biomedical Scientists, Clinical Scientists, Medical Laboratory Assistants and Advanced Practitioners rightly stayed away from their family, friends and support networks – no matter how difficult that felt. They did not “have a quiet one in the staff room” because they do not take alcohol to work. They knew and expected that their colleagues in other public sector environments were acting with the same integrity and insight.

As frontline professionals still dealing with the implications of the pandemic, it is dispiriting and, frankly, damaging to hear you compare our hardworking, self-sacrificing professionals to an elected official who was wilfully breaking the law.

Yours sincerely,

Debra Padgett
IBMS President