Piers Morgan had a tense interview with Care Minister Helen Whately on GMB today as over 30,000 care home residents have now died from coronavirus.
Piers' co-host Susanna Reid started to grill Ms Whately about the fact that a fifth of care home staff haven't been vaccinated.
Ms Whately confirmed that some staff hadn't taken the vaccine and said: "Some people are concerned, but as they see their colleagues getting the vaccine they are more likely to have it.
"We want to support people to get vaccinated and make sure they have the information about the vaccine.
"We are supporting care providers to help their staff get the vaccine, people seeing their colleagues getting it is what works best at the moment."
Piers then turned to how many residents and staff had died and asked Ms Whately for the numver.
She said: "It's truly, truly sad that 23,000 residents have died and 400 social care staff, I won't shy away from that."
Piers interrupted her and said: "The Office of National Statistics say it's more than 30,000 residents and over 400 workers.
"So when the Health Secretary and Boris Johnson say they've put a protective ring around our care homes that's a lie isn't it, otherwise you wouldn't have those numbers dying and the second phase wouldn't have run riot through care homes."
The minister disagreed with Piers and argued that the government had really "stepped up" to protect care homes, spending £1.3billion in measures to protect residents and staff.
Ms Whately said they had learned lessons from the pandemic and had made lots of changes to their procedures when they learned more about the virus.
She said: "People who were asymptomatic with the virus we didn't know you could test people them and that the tests picked up the virus, so since the summer we've ramped up testing in care homes.
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"I wish we had known and of course I wish we'd had more testing."
Piers asked the minister what she would say to people who had lost their relatives in care homes.
She said: "Oh goodness I hate the fact we've seen so many lives lost, I know there are friends and family mourning, I know how tough it's been for the care workers and that's why we've been trying to protect care homes."
Piers ended the interview by saying: "Glad you're doing the right thing now minister, but stop pretending you put this into place in March and April.
*GMB continues at 6am on ITV tomorrow morning
