By Ben Pensant

Like all sensible Covid-cautious leftists, I despise people who don’t wear masks, refuse the vaccine, travel by bus, socialise in pubs, and leave the house every day to go to work instead of staying indoors and shitting a brick every time someone coughs on the telly. I also despise the government but not half as much as I despise people who won’t do what the government tell them. In short I despise anyone who isn’t a fully paid-up self-righteous doomsayer devoted to fighting this killer virus by tutting at strangers and calling Iain Brown a wanker.

But as I’ve written many times before, as much as these dangerous loons deserve pity, abuse, and death threats, we should remember that with a few simple tweaks they could easily be one of us. Because when it comes to Covid, the similarities between Good People who think we should be locked down forever and Bad Bastards who want to poison the population in the name of libertarianism are striking. Indeed, for every brave media pundit who thinks wearing a mask makes them Florence and the Nightingale there’s a deluded yet equally sincere denier who thinks not wearing one makes them Rosie Parks. And while our core arguments are clearly miles apart – we want to save the world, they want to murder it – the solid, principled, vacuously intolerant way we vomit them all over the internet is nigh on identical.

So in the spirit of Winterval, let’s put our differences aside and bond over what unites us. Because despite our mutual loathing, we can all agree it’s been jolly good fun abusing and smearing each other, like only people who’ve been barely affected by Covid but love to whine and pontificate about it on Twitter can.

So here are my 18 – for Covid-18, geddit? – Things Anti-Vax and Pro-Vax Zealots Have in Common.

18. We both spend our lives hysterically fearmongering about something that’s highly unlikely to kill us.

17. We both think you can judge a person’s entire character based on whether or not they put a piece of cloth on their face in Asda.

16. We both think relatively small numbers are actually really, really big ones.

15. We both think politicians are trying to murder us.

14. We both love telling the plebs what’s good for them.

13. We both think people who don’t spend every waking second obsessing over Covid are PART OF THE PROBLEM.

12. We both love banging on about The Science while ignoring the bits of The Science we don’t like.

11. We both take ghoulish satisfaction in people getting ill and dying.

10. We both have zero empathy for anyone who thinks differently.

9. We both think we represent ‘the people’ despite the fact that ‘the people’ either don’t know who we are or think we’re hysterical weirdos.

8. We’re both obsessed with posting pictures of ourselves on trains.

7. We both think normal folk adversely affected by Covid and lockdowns should be grateful to us for fighting their corner by arguing on the internet.

6. We both laud celebrities who agree with us as courageous plain-talking heroes but think the ones who don’t should stick to looking pretty and playing the bongos.

5. We both have a flare for lame hashtags and piss-weak puns such as ‘covidiots’, ‘plandemic’, ‘BorisThe Butcher’, and ‘KBFBITVHSCLUB7’.

4. We both love to share craftily edited, out-of-context, or blatantly fake video clips to promote our tedious agendas.

3. We both hate it when someone points out how similar we are.

2. We both really need to put our phones down.

1. We can both go fuck ourselves.