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Campbell was far from "inside the tent" during the pandemic, except perhaps the first year. To me he seems like text book example of audience capture, similar to Bret Weinstein.

This is different from intentional grift. Millions of views, and the money that brings, does weird things to people. My guess is that what happens is that critical feedback gets swamped out by all the adoration. And perhaps because you get no feedback while talking in the mic, you mistake that for being right.

There's a similar phenomenon, I forgot the term for it, where academics who leave academia often become conspiracy theorists because they're no longer grounded by relentless peer review and instead only get feedback from their non-academic fanbase.

Imo by far the best channel on the topic is TWiV. They grew during the pandemic, but are still only at 128K subscribers. Sadly on Youtube it seems like a good heuristic to ignore anyone with more than a million subscribers.

As for whether not getting the vaccine early on, when there are many uncertainties, is a good decision is tricky. The safest thing might be to wait and avoid people in the mean time. But if you're 100% sure you'll get infected, then you should compare only two things:

1. Infection without vaccination

2. Infection after vaccination

There was no randomized controlled trial for the virus itself (the UK did this later at very small scale). That would be the ideal way to compare the risk of vaccines with the risk of the virus itself. When looking at more recent allegations of mRNA vaccine keep that in mind: the baseline for comparison should be infection.

It seems incredibly implausible to me that a non-replicating tiny fragment of virus mRNA (the vaccine) can do more harm than a replicating complete virus. The latter leaves much more RNA all over your body.

Biology is extremely complex, so it's certainly possible we'll get a nasty surprise, but anyone claiming that is making an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence - that's reviewed by competent people rather than conveniently delivered straight to popular Youtubers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)

waxwing 1y ago

OK you're probably right about the first paragraph; it was lazy of me to make assumptions just from seeing the guys videos about 10-20 times back in the day.

I did listen to TWiV a few times, but it's a bit too in the weeds for me.

"But if you're 100% sure .. baseline for comparison should be infection." Hmm, that sounds true, but this part and especially the 2,3 paragraphs that follow is the centrepoint of what I mean about expertise, intelligence, wisdom: I know you are a trained scientist, as am/was I, but afaik you are not an expert in this field (if you are, forgive the error): do you really think you can assess correctly things like mRNA vaccines? I certainly cannot. But, I did not believe the scientific information coming out at the time, due to the mass hysteria. (The idea of science, even physical science, as unbiased and objective is a bit fantastical nowadays; no chance, and *especially* not something with political sensitivity and with huge economic incentives, too). Sorry if that seems luddite, unserious analysis, but to me it was obvious. And it also seems clear, trying hard to filter and admittedly I could be wrong, but it seems clear that the vaccines did not come without substantial health risks, and were rushed, and were using experimental new tech. It's just to me obviously unwise. The data on total death rates was just not there to support the idea that this was a plague level event requiring desperate measures. All this is an example of taleb's "via negativa" way of thinking; there's a ton of stuff here we can't fully, properly assess; but in the absence of a plague-level event a rush to action like we saw with these vaccines was unwise. Everyone got infected anyway, as you'd expect; the virus became less dangerous over time, as you'd expect. I believe it was a profoundly unwise decision to mass vaccinate with something so new.

Also, thanks for the serious critique of my point of view.

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Sjors Provoost 1y ago

I took several courses in cell biology back in uni, so at least I know the basics of (m)RNA and virus replication. I also followed TWiV for several years during the pandemic, and for a while even a German language podcast with Christian Drosten.

I also kept fairly close track of Dutch statistics (and had at least some knowledge of their strengths and short comings). Read various policy documents and followed technical briefings to parliament.

I participated in an early mRNA vaccine trial. I got the placebo, with side-effects! I also listened to the first FDA approval hearing to see if anyone there raised serious concerns. I read some of the stuff Pfizer submitted back then as well.

Nothing there set off any alarm bells. But it's like reviewing assembly code: I don't think I'd spot a well crafted exploit. But it surely didn't look like rushed junk science. It was fast in large part because serious money was thrown at the problem, where vaccines before were generally not that interesting to big pharma.

But note that my bar was pretty low: I was looking for evidence to contradict my prior that the vaccine is less dangerous than an infection. It's what I needed to know in order to stop avoiding people.

Perhaps if they had found statistically insignificant efficacy combined with severe side effects, I would have been more worried. Because I agree with you that there was some degree of mass hysteria that *could* have pushed a very dangerous vaccine through.

So I consider myself much better informed than e.g. someone listening to Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein, but obviously less informed than a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, economist, etc (none of these experts have a full picture either - which they sometimes forgot).

So I feel somewhat confident stating that, without further information, an mRNA vaccine should be orders of magnitude less harmful than a real virus. And that when conflicting information comes in about bad side effects, the first thing I would recommend is to reconsider how harmful you think the virus is. If that leads to an absurd conclusion (100% mortality) then I would assume there's something wrong with the study of side effects.

In general I don't think one should "do your own research". Only if you're willing to put serious time into it, and have some skill in navigating scientific literature. Even TWiV is ultimately pop science and can only help you so far. It's especially unwise to follow contrarian research unless you really know how to evaluate it. Mainstream science* has issues, but most people who contradict it are wrong. There's no cheat code there. Sometimes simply ignoring an area of science can be fine. But with a pandemic you're kind of forced to take action one way or another. That's one reason why I did "do my own research"

* = hard sciences anyway

Sjors Provoost 1y ago

By the way I agree the tech was experimental, but it's also the closest we've ever gotten to nature's delivery mechanism - with which I had some familiarity. There's very few moving parts that could explain a dramatically bad outcome, especially a delayed one where the trial shows success ... and ten years later we're all dead.