I achieved a personal milestone in April 2020 when, for the first time, one of my articles was flagged up as fake news on Facebook. Spiked rather invited trouble by giving it the headline ‘Smoke fags, save lives’, but even with a subtler title it would have been enough to alarm Zuckerberg’s minions, since it discussed the growing evidence that smokers were heavily under-represented in Covid-19 wards.

Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.

After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it.