In November, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK’s Brexit Party, posted on Twitter. “Let us hope that Pfizer are right about their vaccine. If not then more lockdowns,” he wrote.

The responses were littered with anti-vaxx rhetoric. “If you want to win the next election, you should oppose the damn vaccine, the virus is a hoax,” wrote one follower. “Seriously! Absolutely not! I don’t trust Bill Gates! We would be injected with a substance that will track us with 5G,” said another. 

Farage had recently burst back onto the UK political scene after a two-week quarantine following his return from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Shortly before, he announced he was rebranding his Brexit Party with a new name: Reform UK. 

As Farage told me during a recent telephone conversation, “There's not much point having a Brexit party when you've got Brexit.”