John Campbell | ||||||||||
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| Education |
University of London (Nursing Diploma) Open University (BSc) University of Lancaster (MSc) University of Bolton (PhD) |
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| Children | 2 | |||||||||
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YouTube information
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| Origin | Carlisle, England | |||||||||
| Channel | ||||||||||
| Years active | 2007–present | |||||||||
| Subscribers | 2.65 million | |||||||||
| Total views | 598 million | |||||||||
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Last updated: 31 January 2023 | ||||||||||
John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. As of January 2023, his YouTube channel had 2.72 million subscribers and over 598 million views.
Early life and education
John Lorimer Campbell grew up primarily in the Stanwix district of Carlisle. He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos.
Career
Campbell worked as a nursing educator at the University of Cumbria, and has experience as an emergency department nurse. He has also tutored healthcare workers in Cambodia and India. He is the author of the nursing-related bioscience textbooks Campbell's Physiology Notes and Campbell's Pathophysiology Notes. A review in Emergency Nurse magazine said that the latter textbook contained "excellent [and] inexpensive notes on the causes, pathophysiological changes, and clinical features seen in disease processes". In 2008, he established a YouTube channel to provide educational lectures on topics in health science and nursing.
COVID-19 pandemic
In early 2020 Campbell's YouTube channel started to focus on the developing COVID-19 pandemic. Until then, his videos had been receiving an average of several thousand views each, but his channel began to receive significant traffic after it started running COVID-related videos. Between February and March 2020, his channel increased from an average of 500,000 views per month to 9.6 million, mostly from American viewers. By September 2020, his videos had been viewed more than 50 million times. In March 2020, he argued that China's COVID-19 statistics were grossly underestimated and that the US and UK were doing too little to contain COVID-19. In September 2020, he argued that more ventilation in pubs, restaurants, and cafes would be needed in addition to the existing restrictions.
Early in the pandemic, Campbell spoke of the importance of a "calm and measured approach that is as informed as possible". He said he wanted to assist people in making informed decisions about their health in order to counter what he saw as other people on social media "spreading absolutely bonkers—and sometimes dangerous—information". In August 2020, UNICEF's regional office for Europe and Central Asia cited his YouTube channel as an excellent example of how experts might engage with social media to combat misinformation, citing a March 2020 briefing by Social Science in Humanitarian Action.
In August 2022 David Gorski wrote for Science-Based Medicine that while at the beginning of the pandemic Campbell had "seemed semi-reasonable", he later became a "total COVID-19 crank".
Needle aspiration
In September 2021, Campbell said in a video that he believed that most people in the United Kingdom and United States were "giving the vaccines wrongly". Referencing a study on mice, he said that myocarditis could be caused if the person injecting the vaccine does not perform aspiration (checking that the needle does not hit a blood vessel by initially drawing back the plunger). Aspiration is a common technique but is not without disadvantages, so it has not been recommended by many countries. The video was referenced by American comedian Jimmy Dore on his YouTube talk show to make the misleading claim that a failure to aspirate was causing myocarditis.
Ivermectin
In November 2021, Campbell said in a video that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug—might have been responsible for a sudden decline in COVID-19 cases in Japan. However, the drug had never been officially authorised for such use in the country; its use was merely promoted by the chair of a non-governmental medical association in Tokyo and it has no established benefit as a COVID-19 treatment.Meaghan Kall, the lead COVID-19 epidemiologist at the British Health Security Agency, said that Campbell was confusing causation and correlation and that there was no evidence of ivermectin being used in large numbers in Japan, rather that his claims appeared to be "based on anecdata on social media driving wildly damaging misinformation".
In March 2022, Campbell posted another ivermectin video, in which he misrepresented a conference abstract to make the claim that it "unequivocally" showed ivermectin to be effective at reducing COVID-19 deaths, and that ivermectin was going to be a "huge scandal" because information about it had been suppressed. The authors of the abstract refuted such misrepresentations of their paper, with one writing on Twitter, "People like John Campbell are calling this a 'great thought out study' when in reality it's an abstract with preliminary data. We have randomized controlled trials, why are we still interested in retrospective cohort data abstracts?"
Vaccines
In November 2021, Campbell quoted from a non-peer-reviewed standalone journal abstract by Steven Gundry saying that mRNA vaccines might increase the risk of heart attack, and said that this might be "incredibly significant". This video was viewed over 2 million times within a few weeks and was used by anti-vaccination activists as support for the misinformation that COVID-19 vaccination causes heart attacks. According to a FactCheck.org review, although Campbell had drawn attention to the abstract's typos and its lack of methodology and data, he did not mention the expression of concern that had been issued against it.
In March 2022, Campbell posted a misleading video about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, claiming that a Pfizer document admitted that the vaccine was associated with over 1,000 deaths. The video was viewed over 750,000 times and shared widely on social media. In reality, the document explicitly discredited any connection between vaccinations and reported deaths.
In July 2022, Campbell gave an error-filled account of an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine and falsely claimed that it showed the risk to children from COVID-19 vaccination was much greater than the risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 itself. The video received over 700,000 views. The article actually showed that COVID-19 vaccination greatly reduced the risk of children getting seriously ill from COVID-19.
In December 2022 Campbell posted a video in which he made selective use of statistics to make the misleading claim that COVID-19 vaccines were so harmful that they should be withdrawn. The paper he used was in reality only considering hospitalisations from COVID-19 in a short time window, and not the overall vaccine risk/benefit balance. David Spiegelhalter, chair of Cambridge University's Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, said that such use of the data seemed "entirely inappropriate".
In February 2023, nanomedicine specialist Susan Oliver published a Youtube video debunking false information Campbell has posted about vaccine brain injury. Within six hours Oliver's video was removed, apparently because of the content in clips included from Campbell's video, while Campbell’s entire original remained online. Oliver speculated this may have been as a result of coordinated complaints made by Campbell’s Youtube followers, or that Youtube favoured high-traffic, highly profitable accounts; a Youtube spokesman said the number of complaints received did not affect decisions to remove content.
Death count
A popular misconception throughout the pandemic has been that deaths have been over-reported. In January 2022, Campbell posted a video in which he cited figures from the British Office of National Statistics (ONS) and suggested that they showed deaths from COVID-19 were "much lower than mainstream media seems to have been intimating". He concentrated on a figure of 17,371 death certificates showing only COVID-19 as the cause of death. Within a few days, the video had been viewed over 1.5 million times. It was shared by Conservative Party politician David Davis, who called it "excellent" and said that it was "disentangling the statistics", while American comedian Jimmy Dore used it to claim that COVID-19 deaths had been over-reported and that the figures proved that the public had been victims of a "scaremongering campaign". The ONS responded by debunking the claims as spurious and wrong. An ONS spokesman said suggesting that the 17,000 figure "represents the real extent of deaths from the virus is both factually incorrect and highly misleading". The official figure for COVID-19-related deaths in the UK for the period was over 175,000 at the time; in 140,000 of those cases, the underlying cause of death was listed as COVID-19.
Monkeypox parallels
In July 2022, Campbell posted a video in which he promoted the misleading idea that "parallels" could be drawn between the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 and the 2022 monkeypox outbreak because "both pathogens were being studied in laboratories" prior to an outbreak. The misinformation was embraced by American comedian Jimmy Dore and achieved wide circulation on social media, marking the third time Dore had used a Campbell video to spread COVID-19 misinformation.
Personal life
Campbell continues to reside in his hometown of Carlisle. He has two children.
Selected publications
- Campbell, John (2006). Campbell's Physiology Notes For Nurses. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-03241-1.
- Campbell, John (2006). Campbell's Pathophysiology Notes. ISBN 978-0-955-37970-3.
Further reading
- Gorski D (November 15, 2021). "Pfizer's new COVID-19 protease inhibitor drug is not just 'repackaged ivermectin'". Science-Based Medicine.
- Ashmore J (January 25, 2022). "Have only 17,000 people 'really' died from Covid?". CapX.