So, John Campbell is actually not a reliable source. I've heard he was more accurate at the beginning of the pandemic, but he's gotten more into pandering to a more conspiracy minded audience.
Let me give you one example -- you mentioned something about Pfizer lying that the vaccine stopping transmission. John made a video about that, saying that it was a big cover-up, that Pfizer lied and should have tested that.
But, back when the Pfizer trial came out, here's what John said on Youtube (the important part starts 7 minutes into this video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdTByuSY2g8#t=7m00s
That's right, Campbell said on his show that you can't spread covid if you don't catch covid, that the vaccine was 70% effective against catching covid. So he actually said it would obviously prevent transmission of covid.
But the government didn't actually say that it did prevent transmission. At least, the health authorities didn't. The US FDA and UK authorities said that they didn't know, because trials didn't test that. Here's the statement each of them gave at the time:
I’m in the US, I remember Fauci saying you still had to wear a mask even if you got vaccinated.
Then I think Biden started saying the opposite, because it wasn’t popular and not that many people were getting vaccinated and they were asking, “why would I get vaccinated if I still have to wear a mask?”.
I’m not sure how it played out in the UK. Here’s a BBC report from 2020 saying the vaccines might not stop transmission.
Campbell plays this game of skirting around the Youtube rules, by never exactly saying that vaccines are dangerous or that there's a conspiracy, he just kind of gives the camera winks and funny looks. He admits to doing exactly that (5 minutes and 18 seconds in this video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdTByuSY2g8#t=5m18s
But a lot of the time he's just straight up lying. I wrote one article about him, he made a video saying that Ivermectin and Paxlovid work the same way, and it turns out that's not true, and the papers he presented don't say that.
Why is Campbell dishonest? That question’s easy. He makes more money that way!
There's a big audience of people who want to hear about covid and vaccine conspiracies, and you make a lot of money selling to them on Youtube or Substack. Alex Berenson makes a million dollars a year writing on Substack, many of the other antivaxxers make a few hundred thousand.
Someone tried to do an estimate for Campbell, and came up with this:
A YouTube video makes roughly between $2 and $12 for the content creator as a portion of AdSense revenue per 1000 views. John Campbell gets 300–600k views per episode — so on average 450k * $7 = $3,150 per day with minimal editing and research costs = $1,149,750 pa.
He might be making a million dollars a year! And the more controversial he makes it, the interesting he makes it to his audience, the more he makes.
There are a lot less people that want to hear that the vaccine is safe -- they just trust the government and don't watch Youtube, so you can't make much money selling to them.
And the truth might be probably somewhere in the middle, vaccines are somewhat dangerous, but covid is too. Governments and pharma are somewhat dishonest. But less people want to watch that middleground video.
What happened to your colleague? You said they died from a vaccine? Or just died unexpectedly?
