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.