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At a friend’s house party I found myself sitting next to an anti-vaxxer with a thriving social media profile who became drunk and started boasting.

“I’m making six grand a month out of this,” he said, referring to the earnings of his anti-vaccine stance.

Of course, £6,000 a month is a very modest amount compared to the millions made by more famous influencers.

However, I admit I was jealous because I’ve made the grand total of zero a month from being “anti-vax”—and by “anti-vax” I mean (because I do need to spell it out) that while having other vaccines throughout my life I have not had the Covid vaccine, and I have various ideas based on detailed research about it.

I shouldn’t be so bitter about his earnings, but this guy was a real jerk. He was someone you would never have heard of had it not been for his X account having become quite so hysterical about Covid measures. He was getting invited onto TV and radio shows, and he was loving his D-lister moment in the sun.

He wasn’t particularly well-read or well-informed. He knew nothing of the scientific evidence about the vaccines that I tried to discuss with him. He wasn’t clued up about immunology—although he was utterly soused on my friend’s wine, which he was lavishly helping himself to, so perhaps he just sounded stupid because he was drunk.

He sat at my friend’s kitchen table late into the party as everyone let their hair down and he boasted about how big a star he was becoming in the anti-vax firmament.

The ironic thing was that when I questioned him, he admitted he was fully vaccinated. “Oh, well,” he said, “I just had it to travel. So, you know.”

Not really, no. He had willingly had the vaccine. He had not been affected by it. What’s his beef? He didn’t have one. It was clear as we talked that here was someone who had seen a business opportunity in pretending he was anti-vax.

He was running a series of anti-vaxxer WhatsApp groups, and he wanted to get me onto one of them because, as he said patronizingly, “You really know your onions, don’t you? All these facts and figures…”

The dilettante got his phone out and said, “What are your views on Israel?” He had to know this, he explained, so as to decide which group of anti-vaxxers to put me with. Oh, so there’s subgroups? You join the anti-vaxxer WhatsApps and you end up ranting about Palestine, and Ukraine, and Trump. How ghastly.

“Don’t put me into any of your groups, thank you very much,” I said. I had to pretend I didn’t have a smartphone to get rid of him. He was on me like a vulture. I’m not in any mood for it.

A lot of media figures who have espoused Covid vaccine sceptic views from the start are desperately hard up because of it.

Some of them, like me, lost work from major mainstream media outlets who told them they weren’t wanted anymore once they made their position on the vaccine clear.

“We’re not taking articles on anything to do with lockdown or the vaccine from people who haven’t been vaccinated,” was the response of the features editor of one media group I was used to writing for who cut me off in 2021 over this issue of me personally not getting jabbed, and wanting to write about why.

I was allowed to write about the nuisance of dogs post-lockdown or cyclists, but nothing to do with public health, or they would fall foul of the new pro-vaccine media rules simply by giving someone irresponsible like me a platform, or so they claimed.

Other commentators have been much more persecuted, because those with a really big following warrant the entire system coming down on them like a ton of bricks.

I don’t begrudge Alex Jones one dollar of the money he tries to make from vitamin supplements, books, and T-shirts to keep his channels going in the face of overwhelming odds.

I don’t care if some of the other people I follow on social media including doctors and medical experts are accumulating fortunes from flogging spike protein detoxes and vitamin supplements, as well as profiting from advertising, because if it keeps them afloat and the principle of free speech going, that’s fair enough.

What is galling to a Covid vaccine sceptic who has spoken out from the start is that so many Johnny-come-latelies joined in the scrutiny and outrage only when they sensed the tide might be turning, and only when they saw a chance to make some money out of it. It was never a moral position for them, it was a financial decision.

Jumping on the banned wagon, they cast themselves as initially deceived but now fully “awake”—what a stupid metaphor.

The anti-vax influencer at my friend’s house party was a ruthless self-promoter, a truly unpleasant character. I rarely meet someone who makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but here was such a person. He would have sold his own grandmother for a thousand Instagram followers.

Like a Venn diagram, his career had crossover into other areas of lucrative conspiracy theory—it’s all good business now.

When he wasn’t pretending to be concerned about vaccine deaths, he was spouting hooey about vapor trails from planes being some form of cloud-forming chemical spray, changing the weather so we all perish from vitamin D deficiency and crop failure.

His phone beeped and rang constantly as his posts did this and that. He made calls and barked at people about what was trending while dragging on a cigarette and slurping booze. He struck me as like nothing so much as a trader.

These people may or may not know that a lot of what they’re peddling is nonsense. They may realize they’re mixing fact with fiction, in a great swirl of confusion. They may believe their own hysteria. They may have gotten carried away and gone from legitimate concern about vaccines to sci-fi claims about death by cloud-busting because they’re sending themselves mad. It’s impossible to tell how much they’re faking and how much they believe in their product. Ultimately, they’re probably just trading in it like futures. Flat earth theory—buy! #Where is Kate—sell!

But in terms of their impact, they are effective. The stranger the claim, the more it appeals to a mass audience at a time of paranoia, when everyone is rightly questioning what the hell is being done to us.

One conspiracy theory takes the eye off the other and waters down the concern. But the charlatans like the one in my friend’s kitchen may not much care, because a new conspiracy running each day boosts their followers. Any conspiracy theory will do. The result is narrative chaos.

We saw this most acutely during the Kate Middleton debacle, when sensible voices asking all the right questions were drowned out by the screaming and shouting from the conspiracy trading floor.

Some sensible commentators said: Why don’t we concentrate on asking whether this untimely royal cancer is linked to the Covid vaccines that she had and urged us to have, and look at why she’s so ill at a time when cancer rates are suddenly soaring, and when several members of the Royal Family have cancer at the same time?

And the charlatans said: Yes, or, instead of doing that, why don’t we get into wondering about some totally batshit crazy things that have definitely not happened to Kate Middleton, or anyone, ever?

The conspiracy industry doesn’t aim to shine a light. It aims to dazzle us with ever more outlandish and entertaining possibilities. And so in the headlights, like rabbits, we are blinded.

Ultimately, the big winner is big government, which must be sitting there laughing its head off as the voices of unreason come up with ever more disprovable nonsense.

For a moment there, with Kate Middleton, we had them worried. There were a few weeks of concerted questioning about how a healthy, sporty royal in her early 40s could possibly have cancer. Peter McCullough MD posted an interview on Rumble in which he intelligently delineated the possibilities. A few other leading doctors with concerns about the vaccine weighed in. A majority of public comments beneath many of the Kate articles were alleging a vaccine link. The anger was aimed at what could have caused her illness.

The Palace panicked. The government panicked. That much was clear from the obviously cack-handed response. But once the social media charlatans moved onto the Royal Family being lizards or Illuminati, the authorities were off the hook.

Let the crazies get a little heated up with their Kate clones and their chemtrails, is the deep state view. It takes the eye off the vaccine and it will be fun to douse it all with water once we feel like releasing the evidence it’s claptrap.

Sure, discuss weather-changing technology. Claim the royals do blood sacrifice. Knock yourself out.

The day the Princess came out for Trooping the Colour was their big reveal. See, you nutjobs, everything is fine. You lot were wrong. On all of it. The vaccine theory, still eminently plausible, was declared defunct with the rest of the hysteria.

By lumping the madness in with the serious questions, the authorities have been able to silence so much.

But the charlatan in my friend’s kitchen doesn’t mind that if we go on like this we’ll never get to the truth.

Because the truth would end the hysterical, irrational debates he’s making six grand a month from.