“The main question is how it should be administered – should we dry it out and snort it like powder, mix it into some kind of liquid and drink it, or inject it directly into our veins?” observes top anti-vaxxer Mick Welder of the latest ‘miracle cure’ Covid vaccine alternative, cow dung, in a recent issue of the Daily Excess. “Undoubtedly, whichever way you take it, there are health risks, but far fewer than with those bloody vaccines manufactured by ‘Big Pharma’. Right now in India, more people are taking cow dung as a treatment for Coronavirus than vaccines and let’s face it, all those millions of Indians can’t be wrong!” Welder is seemingly undeterred by the fact that the Indian government has recently issued urgent warnings against the use of cow dung as a Covid treatment in the face of record mortality rates from the virus. “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” he retorts. “Clearly, they are in league with ‘Big Pharma’ – India is one of the globe’s main vaccine manufacturing centres. Obviously they don’t want people to know that an entirely natural and freely available product has greater efficacy than their vaccines!” He also rejects the most recent infection and mortality rates from India, claiming that they are being deliberately inflated in order to fuel demand for vaccines. “Look, this whole pandemic has been blown out of all proportion by governments determined to suppress our civil liberties and big business desperate to maximise their profits from drugs and medical supplies,” he opines. “Sooner or later the public are going to see that they’ve been duped!”

Welder’s latest outpourings have been characterised as a last, desperate, stand of the anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers in the face of the obvious effectiveness of vaccines in controlling the coronavirus crisis. There has also been anger at the role of tabloids like the Daily Excess in providing a platform to the likes of Welder. “These people are scientifically illiterate crackpots,” comments medical journalist Ralph Wrench. “Worse than that, they are dangerous with their campaigns of misinformation, enabled by irresponsible press outlets looking for sensational copy with which to boost their flagging circulations. This cow dung nonsense is just the latest in a long line of ludicrous crack cures that Welder has promoted over the years, from rubbing goose crap into your scalp as a cure for baldness, to pouring coffee up your arse to treat colonic cancers.” Wrench firmly believes that Welder and his ilk have set back the end of lockdown with their anti-vaccine campaigns and maskless marches and should face severe sanctions. “I strongly believe that even once most other restrictions have been lifted, mask wearing in shops should still be enforced,” he says. “Not for any public health reasons, but just so that we can piss of those idiot anti-maskers some more. In fact, I want to see it so strictly enforced that they can’t even shop for food – so that the sight of some anti-masker ‘exercising their rights’ would be reduced to some sad git forced to beg for food outside of supermarkets! If they are lucky someone might throw some tinned peaches or something at them.”

Wrench isn’t alone in his exasperation with the Covid contrarians, with Labour back bencher Ronnie Chisel joining the chorus of demands for retribution. “I really think that we should have been tougher with the anti-mask brigade – they should have been refused service and forcibly ejected from supermarkets,” he says. “I’m also warming to the concept of ‘Covid Passports’. Now, ordinarily I’d be against any form of mandatory ID card on civil liberties grounds but, you know, I like the idea of being able to sit in a pub drinking a pint knowing that all those sad anti-vaxxers are being turned away. Just imagine the pleasure of being able to sit by the window and give them the finger, or make wanker signs at them, as they hang around outside, hoping they’ll be able to sneak in. Trust me, they won’t be feeling so smug and clever then.” Chisel wants to go even further, proposing that if people can’t produce proof of vaccination then they will have to wander around with a bell, shouting ‘Unclean! Unclean!’. “I mean, these people keep screaming that they are being repressed, so let’s give ’em some repression!” he says. “These loons need to have it made clear to them that their anti-social actions have consequences.”

Welder has taken these demands for sanctions against anti-vaxxers and their allies as further proof that the pandemic is simply a hoax designed to suppress their rights. “It is clear that the establishment want to relegate a whole cohort of people to the status of second class citizens, simply because they have dared to dissent from the official lies,” he wrote in the Daily Excess. “The ‘project’ has been laid bare!” Warming to his theme, he proceeded to compare the treatment of anti-lockdown protestors to anti-Brexit protestors. “Did you see any of those anti-Brexit marches policed as closely or as brutally as ours have been?” he asks. “Even though they were trying to defy the ‘will of the people’, whereas we are simply opposing the repression that nobody voted for? Of course not, because their leaders were establishment figures – part of the conspiracy against the people!”

These latest utterances have been taken as further proof that Welder is utterly demented. “This attempt to equate Remainers with anti-vaxxers is typical of the utterly spurious arguments these loons employ,” observes Wrench. “The fact is that the anti-Brexit protests were perfectly lawful and didn’t endanger public safety, regardless of whether you agreed with them or not. Whereas the anti-lockdown marches were being held in the middle of a public health crises when such mass gatherings were expressly banned on public safety grounds!” According to Wrench, this is the standard modus operandi of all contrarian movements, regardless of the issues involved. “They compare apples with pears to try and prove that wrong is right,” he explains. “It was the same when Trump lost the presidential election to Biden and all the little Trump groupies were bawling their eyes out and shouting ‘fraud!’ with no evidence. ‘Oh, so it is OK for you remainers to go to court to get the Brexit vote overturned, but not if Trump resorts to the law to overturn a corrupt election result. Hypocrites!’ They all cried on social media. Except that nobody went to court to overturn the referendum result – the court cases were to ensure that government acted constitutionally and allowed parliament to vote on every stage of Brexit. But hey, what are the facts between crackpots, eh?” Wrench is hopeful that the vaccine roll-out will finally spell the end for the anti-vaxxers. “It isn’t just that they are being proven spectacularly wrong,” he says. “But it is also a matter of natural selection: if the anti-vaxxers continue to refuse vaccines for potentially deadly diseases then their numbers will naturally dwindle and, if we’re lucky, they’ll die out completely.”