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John Campbell (YouTuber)

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John Campbell
Born1957/1958 (age 64–65)[1]
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Education
YouTube information
Channel
Years active2007–present
GenreHealth
Subscribers2.29 million[2]
Total views470 million[2]
YouTube Silver Play Button 2.svg 100,000 subscribers
YouTube Gold Play Button 2.svg 1,000,000 subscribers
Updated: 18 March 2022

John L. Campbell is a British YouTuber and retired nurse educator who has posted YouTube videos and spread misinformation on his Dr. John Campbell channel commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic. By January 2022, his videos had been viewed more than 429 million times.

Campbell has repeatedly made false claims about the use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment,[3] spread misleading commentary about vaccine safety, and wrongly claimed that deaths from COVID-19 have been over-counted.[4][5][6]

Early life and education

Campbell spent his early life primarily in Stanwix, Cumbria.[7]

Campbell received a diploma in nursing from the University of London and Bachelor of Science in biology from the Open University. He subsequently earned a Master of Science in health science from the University of Lancaster and a Ph.D. in nursing education from the University of Bolton.[7] The doctorate was awarded in 2013 for work on developing teaching methods using digital media such as online videos.[7]

Career

Campbell worked as a nursing educator at the University of Cumbria, and has experience as an A&E nurse.[8] He has also taught health workers in India and Cambodia.[8] He is the author of Campbell's Physiology Notes and Campbell's Pathophysiology Notes nursing-related biosciences text books. A 2011 book review in Emergency Nurse magazine said Campbell's Physiology Notes was "excellent, inexpensive notes on the causes, pathophysiological changes and clinical features seen in disease processes".[9]

In 2008, Campbell established a YouTube channel to provide educational lectures on topics in health science and nursing.[10] Until 2020, his videos received, on average, several thousand views each.[10] With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, however, his YouTube channel began to receive significant traffic, during which period he pivoted to focus on major issues related to the pandemic.[10] Between February and March 2020, his channel increased from an average of 500,000 views per month to 9.6 million, the plurality of which originated from the United States.[11] By September 2020, his videos had been viewed more than 50 million times.[12] Campbell has spoken of the importance of "a calm and measured approach that is as informed as possible"[13] and aims to assist people in making informed decisions about their health, giving a counterbalance to what he perceived were other persons on social media "spreading absolutely bonkers – and sometimes dangerous – information".[11]

In August 2020, UNICEF's regional office for Europe and Central Asia cited Campbell's Youtube channel as an excellent example of how experts might engage with social media to combat misinformation,[14] citing a March 2020 briefing by .[15]

COVID-19 misinformation

Further information: Ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic

In November 2021, Campbell said in a video that ivermectin 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.[3] Meaghan Kall, the lead epidemiologist for COVID-19 at the UK Health Security Agency, said that Campbell was confusing causation and correlation. Further, Kall said that there was no evidence of ivermectin being used in large numbers in Japan; rather, she said it "appears this was based on anecdata on social media driving wildly damaging misinformation".[3]

In March 2022, Campbell posted another video on ivermectin, in which he misrepresented a conference abstract to make the claim that it "unequivocally" showed ivermectin to be effective at reducing COVID-19 mortality, and that ivermectin was going to be a "huge scandal" because information about it had been suppresed. The authors of the study have had to rebut such misrepresentations of their paper; one tweeted that "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?".[16]

In November 2021, Campbell quoted from a non-peer-reviewed journal abstract by Steven Gundry saying that mRNA vaccines might cause heart problems.[5] Campbell's 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 will cause a wave of heart attacks.[5] According to a FactCheck review, Campbell had in his video drawn attention to typos in the abstract, and a lack of methodology and data, but he did not mention the expression of concern that had been published for the abstract, saying instead that it could be "incredibly significant".[5]

In March 2022, Campbell posted a misleading video about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, claiming that a Pfizer document showed it was associated with 1,223 deaths. The video was viewed over 750,000 times and shared widely on social media. In reality, the documents cited explicitly disclaimed any connection between vaccinations and deaths reported.[4] Campbell posted a follow up video two days later acknowledging that he had wrongly assumed that the health associations were caused by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and apologising for his mistake, but has not removed the misleading video. [17]

A popular misconception throughout the pandemic has been that deaths have been overreported.[6] In January 2022, Campbell posted a Youtube video in which he cited figures from the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) suggesting they showed deaths from COVID-19 were "much lower than mainstream media seems to have been intimating" and concentrated on a figure of 17,371 death certificates where only COVID-19 was recorded as a cause of death. Within a few days the video had been viewed over 1.5 million times.[18] It was shared by British Conservative politician David Davis who called it "excellent" and said that it was "disentangling the statistics", and American comedian Jimmy Dore used it to claim that COVID-19 deaths had been overreported and that it proved the public had been the victim of a "scaremongering campaign".[19][6] The ONS responded by debunking the claims as spurious and wrong.[20] An ONS spokesman said "to suggest that [the 17,000] figure represents the real extent of deaths from the virus is both factually incorrect and highly misleading".[19] The official figure for COVID-19-related deaths in the UK for the period was over 175,000, in 140,000 of those cases the underlying cause of death was listed as Covid.[6][21]

Personal life

Campbell resides in Carlisle in the United Kingdom.[12] He has two children.[1]

Selected publications

  • Campbell, John (2006). Campbell's Physiology Notes For Nurses. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-03241-1.

References

  1. ^ a b "Retired doctor becomes YouTube sensation for coronavirus videos". news.com.au. March 15, 2020. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  2. ^ a b "About Dr. John Campbell". YouTube.
  3. ^ a b c Satherley, Dan (November 26, 2021). "Did mutations or ivermectin help stamp out Delta in Japan?". Newshub (Fact check). Archived from the original on December 16, 2021.
  4. ^ a b Carballo-Carbajal I (March 11, 2022). "Pfizer's confidential document shows adverse events reported following vaccination; it doesn't demonstrate that the vaccine caused the events or is unsafe". Health Feedback.
  5. ^ a b c d Jaramillo, Catalina (December 16, 2021). "No Credible Evidence COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines 'Dramatically Increase' Heart Attack Risk, Contrary to Flawed Abstract" (Fact check). FactCheck.org.
  6. ^ a b c d Cercone, Jeff (January 22, 2022). "No, death totals from COVID-19 in England have not been overstated". Politifact (Fact check). Poynter Institute.
  7. ^ a b c "Double Doctorates". Connect (Newsletter). University of Cumbria (Autumn): 7. 2013.
  8. ^ a b "Doctor's virus videos go global". Newsroom. March 23, 2020. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
  9. ^ Evans R (2011). "Campbell's Physiology Notes". Emergency Nurse (Book review). 19 (3): 9. doi:10.7748/en.19.3.9.s3. PMID 27645791.
  10. ^ a b c Harris, Margot (March 16, 2020). "An emergency nurse went viral on YouTube for his videos on the coronavirus, bringing in millions of views on his health and science lectures". Business Insider. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  11. ^ a b Marsh, Sarah (March 7, 2020). "UK manufacturers and YouTube medics see coronavirus surge". The Guardian. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  12. ^ a b Colley, Jacob (September 10, 2020). "Dr John Campbell makes coronavirus ventilation plea". News & Star. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  13. ^ Harris, Margot (March 16, 2020). "An emergency nurse went viral on YouTube for his videos on the coronavirus, bringing in millions of views on his health and science lectures". Insider. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  14. ^ Bianco V (August 2020). "Countering Online Misinformation—Resource Pack" (pdf). Tomsa S, Vasques MM, Stefanet S. UNICEF.
  15. ^ Social Science in Humanitarian Action. "Key considerations: online information, mis- and disinformation in the context of COVID-19 (March 2020)" (PDF).
  16. ^ Teoh F (March 10, 2022). "Ivermectin wasn't shown to be more effective than remdesivir, contrary to claim by John Campbell". Health Feedback.
  17. ^ "Long list of side effects to look out for". YouTube.
  18. ^ Schraer, Rachel (January 29, 2022). "Covid: Posts claiming only 17,000 died of virus 'factually incorrect'" (Reality check). BBC News.
  19. ^ a b Whipple, Tom (January 28, 2022). "ONS rejects '17,000 Covid deaths' claim". The Times. (subscription required)
  20. ^ Davies, Caroline (January 28, 2022). "ONS debunks 'spurious' Covid deaths claim shared by David Davis". The Guardian.
  21. ^ "More or Less, Should you follow the 5 second rule? And does inflation hit the poorest harder?". BBC. January 26, 2022. Retrieved February 15, 2022.

Further reading

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