John Campbell (YouTuber)
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.
[19] 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.
[20]
Ivermectin
Further information:
Ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic
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.
[21] 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".
[21]
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?"
[22]
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".
[4] 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.
[4] 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.
[4]
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.
[3]
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.
[23]
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".
[24]
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.
[25]
Death count
A popular misconception throughout the pandemic has been that
deaths have been over-reported.
[5] 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.
[26] It was shared by
Conservative Party politician
David Davis, who called it "excellent" and said that it was "disentangling the statistics",
[5] 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".
[27] The ONS responded by debunking the claims as spurious and wrong.
[28] 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".
[27] 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.
[5][29]
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.
[30]
