John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator who has made videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later diverged into COVID-19 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 March 2024, his YouTube channel had 3 million subscribers and over 750 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. On the BBC's statistical programme More or Less, editor Richard Vadon said that Campbell – who was neither a scientist nor a medical doctor – had been on "quite a journey" since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic transitioning from "wholesome" videos on topics such as hand-washing, to what could be regarded as more fringe topics, garnering a large audience in the process. 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", arguing that by October 2022 Campbell had become a source of misinformation and he had adopted an anti-vaccination stance. Others have expressed concern that Campbell's videos have been used by podcaster Jimmy Dore and others to support false claims against the COVID-19 vaccines.
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.
Ivermectin
In November 2021, Campbell said in a video that ivermectin—an antiparasitic drug—may have contributed to 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 the focus of 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?"
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