Is 5G Going to Kill Us All? (2024)

On a hot day last summer, Debbie Persampire, a 47-year-oldhomemakerwho believes that cell phones are poisoning her children, tookme on a tour of her irradiated house on Long Island. Her kids were at school,her husband was at work, and the house, a modest, tidy split-level typical ofthe suburbs, was spectacularly quiet. She brandished a handheld battery-powereddevice called an Acoustimeter to measure the radiation and wavedme on up the stairs to the second floor, into the rooms where her childrenslept.

Outside, roughly 70 feet from the beds of her son, who is 12 yearsold, and her daughter, who is 10, was the source of her concern: a cell site,a nondescript box the shape of a small steamer trunk that was affixed to autility pole just beyond the fence line. Crown Castle, the nation’s largestprovider of communications infrastructure, installed the unit in May 2017,and it began operating seven months later. It emitted, like all cell sites, aconstant stream of microwave electromagnetic fields, or EMFs.

In April 2019, a few months before my visit, she had put onsome old clothes, hauled a ladder in from the garage, and spent the daypainting the walls and ceilings of the children’s rooms in a grim matte blackmore suitable for a death metal club. Known as YShield HSF54, the paint came injust one color. She’d purchased it from LessEMF, of Latham, New York, a company that also sells Acoustimeters.LessEMF, whose tagline is “Work, sleep, live better in the electrified world,” claimsYShield is effective at absorbing EMFs. Persampire had received from LessEMF ashipment of 10 liters of Yshield (just over two and a half gallons) at the heftyprice of $658, along with her Acoustimeter, which set her back $400 more. Witheach stroke of the paint, she said, “came a sense of relief, like I couldbreathe again.”

Her husband and children, she told me, trusted she was doing theright thing. “If anyone thought I was crazy, they didn’t say so,” she said. “Ididn’t know much about this topic before Crown Castle placed that antenna. ThenI read the science, and now I know more than I ever wanted to know. We livewith involuntary 24/7 radiation, even in my children’s beds as they sleep.”

One of the studies that prompted her concern was a 2018 report bythe National Toxicology Program, a branch of the National Institute forEnvironmental Health Sciences. Commissioned by the Food and Drug Administrationto examine the human health risks of cell phone radiation, NTP researchersplaced lab rats in “reverberation chambers”—metal boxes resembling microwaveovens—and, over a period of two years, exposed certain rats for nine hours aday, every day, to EMFs of the type that flow ubiquitously from Wi-Fi hubs andcell sites into our laptops, iPads, smartphones, and, of course, ourbodies.

The researchers concluded there was “clear evidence” that cell phone radiation in exposed malerats can cause cancers andprecancerous lesions in the heart and brain.The lead designer of the study, veteran toxicologist Ron Melnick, reported thatthe researchers also found tumors in rats’ prostate glands, DNA damage in braincells, heart muscle disease, and reduction in birth weights.

Persampire was stunned. “My initial reaction was, How is itpossible that this can be ignored? When is this going to catch on like wildfireand have everyone making changes?” She promptly ditched her home Wi-Fi router,hard-wiring the family’s computers and installing a landline phone with a longcord. While that diminished the risk, it hardly eliminated it. Persampire knewfrom her research that the microwave radiation beamed from cell sites was inthe air, all around us. We were exposed whether we used it or not.

The NTP report was not an outlier. There were similarly alarmingresults in numerous other research studies. With each report she read, Persampire’sconcern grew into a kind of panic. There was the warning in 2011 by theInternational Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World HealthOrganization in Lyon, France, that cell phone radiation was a “possible carcinogen.” There was the voluminous BioInitiative Report, begun in 2007, based on the work of 29 scientists and healthexperts from 10 countries, who reviewed over 1,800 studies of EMF healtheffects published since 2007. Persampire read every one of its 1,557 pages andeven reached out to its co-editor, Dr. David Carpenter, a medical doctor whodirects the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University ofNew York at Albany. She asked if she should be worried. Carpenter said she should.

Then in 2019, she came across the website of a group called theInternational EMF Scientists Appeal. Among its more than 250 members, the groupcounted biophysicists, biochemists, and physicians from 43 countries, includingprofessors at Harvard Medical School, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins,who collectively had published in professional journals some 2,000 papers andletters on the biological effects of microwave EMFs.In recent years, thegroup issued a series of “urgent” pleas to the WHO andthe United Nations Environment Programme to “address the global public healthconcerns related to exposure to cell phones.” The first of its ninerecommendations was that “children and pregnant women be protected” fromexposure.

The signatories of the EMF Scientists Appeal were particularlyconcerned with a vaunted new wireless communications system known as 5G, which,they warned, was totally untested for human health risk. Searching online andmaking a few calls, Persampire soon learned that the cell site 70 feet from herchildren’s bedrooms was in fact a 5G-capable unit. What this meant for thesafety of her kids, she did not know. Worse, she soon realized, nobody did.

On October 13, 1983, Bob Barnett, then the president of AmeritechMobile Communications, placed the first commercial cell phone call. Therecipient, as befitted the historic occasion, was the grandson of AlexanderGraham Bell, who had inventedthe telephone more than a century before. Barnett placed the call on a MotorolaDynaTAC 8000X. It weighed two pounds, was 13 inches long, operated only for 30minutes before needing a charge, and retailed for $4,000.

No doubt the audio quality was far from perfect, but improvementswould come at a breakneck pace. The bricklike first-generation, or “1G,” phonesof the 1980s gave way in subsequent decades to ever more miniaturized andinexpensive 2G devices, which allowed users to hear clearly and talk at length.2G also enabled a totally new form of communication called texting. The 2000sbrought 3G, which offered higher-quality telephony; miraculous-seeming, iftorturously slow, internet access; and primitive video.With Long-TermEvolution, or LTE, and 4G systems in the 2010s came full-on internet browsing,streaming movies, Instagram, and p*rn at your fingertips—the smartphone as weknow it today.

On the horizon is the new protocol, 5G, fifth-generation wireless,which has been celebrated as heralding a “fourth industrial revolution.” Boasting transmission speeds as much as fivetimes faster than current LTE and 4G systems, 5G promises to usher in anew golden age of wireless, a world of total connectivity.

With 5G, the latency of transmission—the lag between the momentinformation is sent and received—will drop to very low levels. That meanscrystal-clear audio, video chats, and teleconferencing in absolute real time,and films downloaded in mere seconds. It will also, at last, enable themuch-ballyhooed “internet of things” to usher in a hyperconnectedfuture. As Wired put it, with breathless fanfare: “All the things we hope will make ourlives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internetconnections.”

With the internet of things, just about every appliance in yourhome—televisions, refrigerators, stovetops, dishwashers, coffee kettles, ovens,toasters, and lighting and heating systems—will connect to a seamlessslipstream of electromagnetic frequencies and communicate among themselves.Additionally, 5G will make possible the widespread use of driverless cars,piloted by machine intelligence; routine telemedicine procedures conductedrobotically by surgeons via remote connections; aerial drone deliveries ofgoods; and other high-tech magic as yet unimaginable. “5G is about to change theworld,” a Qualcomm vice president wrotethis year,declaring “potential 5G use cases as infinite, or at least only as finite asthe frontier of human innovation.”

All that potential explains why antennas like the one byPersampire’s home are springing up everywhere.The telecom industry hasreported that 5G will require over 800,000 cell sites by 2026, over twice the number that has been built to date.The antennas will be clusteredlower to the ground, closer to homes, businesses, offices, schools, and parks; affixed to utility poles, on cell towers, on residences, and rooftops. They likelywon’t look much different from the unit outside Persampire’s house, and most ofus will probably not notice their arrival.

The build-out, one of the most expensive communicationsinfrastructure expansions in U.S. history, is expected to require tens ofbillions of dollars of investment and, it’s hoped, bring in many times that inprofits, adding over $17 trillionto the global economy by 2035, by one estimate.

Meanwhile, millions of miles of new fiber-optic cable will be laidunderground or strung on utility poles to support the insatiable hunger forbandwidth.And as consumers enter the upgrade cycle for 5G-capabledevices, many millions of new phones will be manufactured and sold globallyover the next five years, while the total number of connectedinternet-of-things devices will rise to an estimated 50 billion by 2022.

5G, in other words, is big money, and for obvious reasons thetelecom service providers, the phone manufacturers and distributors, thefiber-optic cable and cell site manufacturers and installers would prefer that therollout proceed without impediment.

One of the central tenets of modern public health regulation isthe precautionary principle. This is the commonsense idea that without clearevidence that innovations are safe for the public, their use should berestricted, if not avoided altogether.

When I first wrote about cell phone radiation in 2010, I met a neuroscientist namedAllan Frey who had spent decades in the field of bioelectromagnetics, which isthe study of the effects of EMFs on living organisms. Working at GeneralElectric’s Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University in the 1960s, Freydevised an experiment whereby frogs would be exposed to certain microwavefrequencies. His findings were surprising. The radiation, he discovered, couldtrigger heart arrhythmias, and with a slight change in the frequencies, hecould stop the frogs’ hearts from beating altogether.

The prevailing wisdom had previously held that only the ionizingfrequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (x-rays, gamma rays, and the like)could disrupt living cells and produce an adverse biological effect. According to this orthodoxy, theonly way frequencies below the ionizing part of the spectrum could alter livingorganisms is with what’s called a thermal effect, when the radiation isdirected at very high power to heat up tissue, as in a microwave oven.

Frey’s study looked at nonthermal effects from low-powermicrowave frequencies—the levels similar, as it happens, to those by which oursmartphones operate today. Among his most significant discoveries was that suchfrequencies can indeed be made dangerous using what is known as modulation. Insimple terms, modulation occurs when a signal is embedded with another signalthat carries information, such as the sounds, pictures, and movies on yourphone. This second signal modulates the “carrier” signal.

In a study published in 1975 in the Annals of the New YorkAcademy of Sciences—a study famous in the field of bioelectromagnetics—Freyreported that low-power microwave frequencies at certain modulations couldinduce “leakage” in the barrier between the circulatory system andthe brain in rats. Breaching the blood-brain barrier is a serious matter,exposing the brain to toxins, viruses, and bacteria.

Another longtime researcher in this field, Henry Lai, then aprofessor of bioengineering at the University of Washington,in the 1990sshowed with fellowresearcher Narendra P. Singh that modulated microwave frequenciesin exposed rats could cause breaks in DNA strands, such that genetic mutationsmight result and be passed on. The damage, shockingly, occurred with a singletwo-hour exposure.

In 2003, a neurosurgeon named Leif Salford replicatedFrey’s blood-brain barrier work and went a step further, finding that modulatedmicrowave frequencies could actually kill brain cells in rats. “A rat’sbrain is very much the same as a human’s,” Salford told the BBC. “They have the same blood-brain barrier and neurons. Wehave good reason to believe that what happens in rats’ brains also happens inhumans’.”

What troubles experts in bioelectromagnetics most is that thedestructive effects these studies have documented occurred at levels far belowthe human safety exposure limits set by the Federal Communications Commission.

In September 2017, Dr. Martin Pall, a professor emeritus ofbiochemistry at Washington State University, presented the evidence of risk at an event sponsored by the National Institutesof Health. Pall cited 18 studies that revealed microwave EMFs could alter thestructure of the testes and ovaries, lower sperm count, and diminish theproduction of sex hormones. Twenty-five studies suggested that EMFs couldproduce “neurological/neuropsychiatric effects,” including, in Pall’s litany,“insomnia, fatigue, depression, headache” in humans and “major changes in brainstructure seen in animals.” At least 21 studies, including those conducted by Lai and Singh, attested to single-strand and double-strand breaks in cellular DNA.Some 32 studies found oxidative stress and free radical damage to cells andelevated levels of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, which can causeneurodegenerative disorders such as dementia. Pall warned that microwave EMFsare “much more active in children than in adults,” because children, amongother factors, have thinner skulls, allowing EMFs to more deeply penetrate thebrain, and higher densities of stem cells that apparently are more sensitive tomicrowave radiation.

All of these effects, he noted, occur at exposure levels “ordersof magnitude” lower than those allowed by current U.S. and international safetyguidelines. Pall takes the risk so seriously that he now wears a metal meshundergarment designed, he says, to deflect the electropollutants emanating fromcell sites, mobile phones, and Wi-Fi antennas. He does not carry a cell phone oruse Wi-Fi, and his work computer is hard-wired.

At the conclusion of his talk, he turned to the question of 5Gtechnology. He invoked the precautionary principle: Given the research to dateabout earlier generations of microwave telecom systems, the 5G rollout, Pall toldthe NIH assembly, was “absolutely insane.”

You can think of an electromagnetic frequency like ocean wavesreaching the shore at a set interval. The more frequent the waves, the smallerthe distance between them, i.e., the shorter the “wavelength.” So, for example,a frequency of three gigahertz has a wavelength of 99 centimeters; at 300 GHz, the wavelength is less thana millimeter.

The extremely high frequencies—what scientists call millimeterwaves, which range from 30 to 300 GHz—carry information at faster speeds. While2G, 3G, and 4G function at frequencies as low as 700 megahertz and as high as 2.5 GHz, 5G will operate using millimeter waves. These penetrate objects lesseasily, which explains the need for vastly increased numbers of cell sites atcloser proximity to users. (As 5G-capable cell sites come online in the next fewyears, the earlier generations of microwave systems will not fade away but willremain in operation as a kind of backup, meaning that total levels of exposurewill vastly increase.)

Millimeter waves have never before been made available forpublic communications systems. They have, however, been utilized by the U.S. military, and what little we know about those applications gives some observerspause. The U.S. Air Force, for example, has developed weapons using millimeterwaves to cause the skin of enemy combatants (or, as the need arises, unrulycrowds of citizens) to heat up painfully. One of these weapons, known as the Active Denial System, can send a high-power beam of energy adistance of up to 1,000 meters to penetrate less than one-sixty-fourth of an inch into theskin, inflaming the skin’s surface.

The most comprehensive review of the biological effects ofmillimeter waves was conducted by a team at the U.S. Army Medical ResearchDetachment at Brooks Air Force Base, in San Antonio, and published in 1998. Theresearch group observed “[p]rofound MMW effects … at all biological levels, from cell-freesystems, through cells, organs, and tissues, to animal and human organisms.”Significantly, it also noted that “many of the reported effects wereprincipally different from those caused by heating, and their dose andfrequency dependencies often suggested nonthermal mechanisms”—which is to saythat, once again, the research showed bioeffects from microwave frequenciesthat occurred well below the power levels required to cause heating.

EMF researchers have pointed out that millimeter waves areless able to penetrate skin than lower-frequency waves, suggesting they shouldtherefore be less dangerous. Yet the variety of bioeffects described by the ArmyMedical Research team were “quite unexpected from a radiation penetrating lessthan 1 mm into biological tissues,” as the report stated.The researchersadmitted to being confounded by the evidence, saying that the observed effects“could not be readily explained.”

The report added that “biological effects of aprolonged or chronic MMW exposure of the whole body … have never beeninvestigated.” The safety limits, it pointed out, are “based solely onpredictions,” an approach it deemed “not necessarily adequate.”

Last October, Dr. Joel Moskowitz, of the School of Public Healthat the University of California, Berkeley, asserted in Scientific Americanthat exposure to millimeter waves “can have adverse physiologicaleffects.” His article was titled, “We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe.” Moskowitzhas spent more than four decades in the field of public health research andpolicy, and now directs the Center for Family and Community Health at Berkeley. According to his review of the recent literature—what little of itthere is—millimeter waves might negatively affect the peripheral nervoussystem, the immune system, and the cardiovascular system. “The researchsuggests,” he wrote, “that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin(e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g.,sterility).”

The research suggests—in other words, we really don’t know.

“When we talk about 5G, we’re not working with a full deck,” LouisSlesin, the editor and publisher of Microwave News, a journal thatcovers microwave technology, told me. “With 5G, not only are there practicallyno health studies, we don’t have a clue about the modulations that will beused.” He noted that the studies about millimeter waves remain classified. “Thegovernment, I think, knows more than it’s willing to say.”

In December 2018, concerned about the health implicationsof the 5G rollout, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat from Connecticut,sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission’s Brendan Carr, noting that “most of our currentregulations regarding radiofrequency safety were adopted in 1996 and have notyet been updated for next generation equipment and devices.” He asked him tocite any recent studies demonstrating the technology’s safety.Carr replied in part by citing an FDA statement that claimed “the available scientific evidence continues to not support adverse health effects in humans caused by exposures at or under the current radiofrequency energy exposure limits.”

Blumenthal found Carr’s response so lacking that he pressed theissue two months later, in a February 6 hearing of the Senate Committee onCommerce, Science, and Transportation. The hearing was titled, “Winning the Race to 5Gand the Next Era of Technology Innovation in the United States.” The witnesses included,among others, executives from CTIA, thewireless industry trade association.

Declaring that “Americans deserve to know what the health effectsare,” Blumenthal asked the hearing’s witnesses directly: “How much money hasthe industry committed to supporting additional independent research? ... Is thatindependent research ongoing? Has any been completed?”

What was extraordinary was that these top-tier industry executivesfreely admitted there were no studies showing 5G systems would be safe for thepublic. The telecom industry had dedicated no money to such research; none wasongoing, none had been completed.

“So we are kind of flying blind here, as far as health and safetyis concerned,” Blumenthal concluded.

Still, he didn’t seem especially surprised by the nonresponse.The objective of the session was not to protect the public, after all, but tosupport the industry, and whatever the health risks of 5G, they were quicklybrushed aside in an hours-long hearing dominated by demands that governmentregulators grease the efficiency of the rollout. Meredith Attwell Baker,president of CTIA, counseled the senators that “the U.S. is not the onlycountry to recognize the transformational impact of 5G. There is internationalconsensus: The nations that lead on 5G will capture millions of new jobs andbillions in economic growth.”

To hear the witnesses tell it, the only real risks were to American tech-sector profits and national security, due to the commanding position among5G equipment suppliers of Chinese-owned companies Huawei and ZTE. (The U.S. hasceded the 5G infrastructure market to foreign manufacturers.)

Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-ChinaEconomic and Security Review Commission, told the committee that China is“already doing everything it can legally and illegally” to ensure itssuperiority. Baker framed 5G aspart of a global techno-industrial arms race. “We cannot take our foot off theaccelerator,” she cautioned.“To fully realize the technologicalbreakthroughs we are talking about, we need more spectrum, and we need it assoon as possible.”

Asked to comment on the lack of research on the potential healtheffects of the technology the industry is so restless to bring to market, aspokesperson for CTIA insisted that “the safety of consumers is thewireless industry’s first priority,” adding,“We follow the guidance ofexperts when it comes to cellphones and health effects.” Quoting the FCC’s latest evaluation of the health risks, conducted in 2019, theCTIA spokesperson told me in an email, “‘No scientific evidence establishes acausal link between wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses.’”

The spokesperson directed me to Eric Swanson, a professor oftheoretical physics at the University of Pittsburgh and a paid consultant tothe telecom industry. “[F]ederal agencies responsible for regulating the safetyof cell phones and wireless infrastructure,” he wrote in an emailed statementthat was vetted by CTIA, “have not found any link between electromagneticfields allowed by the FCC regulations and cancer or other adverse healtheffects.” Swanson also insisted, “The consensus of the world-wide health andsafety organizations is that non-ionizing fields at the levels allowed by theFCC regulations are safe.”

As proof of this “consensus,” he cited declarations of cell phoneEMF safety that had been issued by the FDA, theNational Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the European ScientificCommittee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, the WHO, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety.

But while these regulatory and health advocacy organizations maybe in agreement, no such consensus exists in the scientific community. Iforwarded Swanson’s 3,500-word statement to Joel Moskowitz of Berkeley. “Themajority of scientists who study non-ionizing EMFs and publish peer-reviewedresearch on this topic disagree with these organizations,” he told me. One needonly look, for example, to the hundreds of independent researchers—Moskowitz isone of them—who have signed the International EMF Scientists Appeal.

The 2018 publication of the National Toxicology Program’s EMFstudy prompted considerable relief among researchers and public healthadvocates alarmed at the lack of discussion around the technology’s risks. Thefindings of cancer and other effects in rats exposed to phone frequencieswould, it was hoped, change the national conversation.

Dr. Ron Melnick, 76, oversaw the design and protocols for the EMFrodent experiment. He retired from the NTP in 2009, having spent 28 yearsstudying the toxicity of everything from perfluorinated chemicals, which leachfrom Teflon cookware, to the by-products of water chlorination. One of his mostconsequential investigations involved butadiene, a compound found in cigarettesmoke and tailpipe emissions.In the wake of Melnick’s studies of thechemical, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration reduced thepermissible exposure by 99.9 percent.

The protocols that Melnick crafted for the rodent study—not leastthe reverberation chambers as an approximation of human exposure—came underrigorous review from officials at the EPA, FDA, NIOSH, and the BioelectromagneticsSociety, among others.From these peer reviewers, the unanimous conclusionwas that this would be the most authoritative animal study yet conducted in theU.S. for assessing human risk. It would also, as it happens, be the mostexpensive toxicity investigation that taxpayers ever funded, at a cost of $30 million.

Not long after the publication of the final results of the NTPstudy, a group of researchers at the Ramazzini Institute, a nonprofit cancerresearch lab in Bologna, Italy, released the findings of their own study of thehealth effects of EMF radiation. The lead author of the experiments, Dr.Fiorella Belpoggi, had spent most of her 44-year career, like Melnick, lookingat suspect agents—solvents, plastics, pesticides, fuel additives, and asbestos,among others—and now had turned her attention to the toxicity of microwaveEMFs.

Rather than using Melnick’s custom-designed reverberation chambersto examine the effects of radiation from nearby sources, the Ramazzini teamexamined exposures from more distant “farfield” sources, such as cell towers.But the results aligned. “They observed, as we did, an increase of glialcell tumors of the brain and Schwann cell tumors of the heart,” Belpoggitold me in an email. “Such rare tumors in the same strain of rats, inboth studies statistically significant, at different levels of exposure—near-fieldand farfield—in two different laboratories, cannot be just by chance.”

I asked Belpoggi about the significance of the NTP and Ramazzinistudies for determining human safety exposure limits. “What I do not understandis why, for example, the chemical industry has to demonstrate the safety of acompound before putting it into the market,” she replied, “but the technologyindustry has no such rule, and they disseminate their products without anystudy of the impact on public health.” She offered one theory to explain thediscrepancy: “The economic value of the telecom industry now is enormous.” LikeMartin Pall, Belpoggi called for application of the precautionary principle,both for exposure from current microwave systems and for the new system of 5Gmillimeter waves. “I cannot affirm that millimeter waves are dangerous,” shetold me, “but no one can affirm that they are not.”

In the U.S., the FDA ignored the Ramazzini findings. Asfor the NTP report, the agency issued a statement in 2018 denying the study’s validity fordetermining human safety, despite the fact that it had commissioned the study,and the federal government had lavishly funded it, for that very purpose.Reaffirming the FCC’s 1996 exposure limits, the director of the Center for Devices andRadiological Health at the FDA, Jeffrey Shuren, wrote in a letter that the FDA had “concluded that no changes tothe current standards are warranted at this time,” and stated flatly that“NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phoneusage.”The FDA assured the public, in direct contradiction of the NTPresults, that “the available scientific evidence to date does not supportadverse health effects.”

Ron Melnick was shocked. “I’ve never experienced a governmentagency dismissing cancer results, as was done by the FDA with cancer and cellphone radiation,” he told me. “FDA asked the NTP to assess human risk, theresults were provided—and now they’re saying they don’t accept the results?”

CTIA had asked Eric Swanson, the telecom consultant, to comment onthe NTP study, which he attacked, in his emailed statement, for what he calledthe “unreliable statistical significance of the … study conclusions.” He warnedof the likelihood of false positives due to “obvious flaws in the study.” Yetthe putative flaws he identified, according to Joel Moskowitz, had beendebunked by both former and present NTP staffers, among them Ron Melnick in an article for the journal Environmental Research, in which he refuted the “unfounded criticisms”one by one. “The methods employed by the NTP are considered by mosttoxicologists to be the gold standard,” Moskowitz told me. He called the FDA’sdismissal of the study “a travesty” and suggested that “politicalconsiderations” were likely to blame.

Politicalconsiderations—meaning industry influence—may be playing an outsize role in thescientific determinations of other groups that have granted microwave telecomsystems a clean bill of health. The WHO’s conclusion thatthe systems are safe, for example, relies on exposure limits recommended by theInternational Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, anongovernmental organization whose advising scientists on EMF issues areclosely tied to telecom companies. Last year, in a series titled “The 5G Mass Experiment,” a pan-European group of investigative journalists found that ofthe 14 chief scientists at ICNIRP who crafted cell phone EMF safety guidelines, 10 had received funding from industry. The conclusion was that these ICNIRPmembers comprise a “small circle of insiders who reject alarmingresearch,” effectively serving their telecom paymastersby setting lax exposure limits.

The WHO itself appears to be divided on the issue. Its own cancer researchbranch, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified microwaveEMFs as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011. Last year, an IARC advisorygroup of 29 scientists examined the peer-reviewed research on cancer risk and thenadvised that IARC revisit its 2011 decision and prioritize microwave EMFs foranother review. It is uncertain whether IARC will do so.

On my way to meet Debbie Persampire, riding the Long Island Rail Roadfrom New York City, I sat in a car near a group of preteens, who each clutcheda smartphone close to their body. The kids giggled and swiped and playedmusic and videos as their mothers sat silently nearby, mesmerized by their ownphones.

Persampire picked me up at the train station, and I mentioned thescene in the car. “The science is telling us the devices are utterlydangerous,” she said. “The combination of the danger with their clearlyaddictive nature—well, we need to start thinking about what we’re doing.”

Persampire’s answer was to start a grassroots coalition called Citizens for 5G Awareness, which has been busily agitating since its founding in 2018. It has pestered elected officials with email and letter-writing campaigns,testified before county commissions, organized street rallies and protests,hosted public screenings of its new favorite film, Generation Zapped, and, not least, shared grim YouTube videos. One documents anexperiment conducted by schoolchildren who discovered that plants were unable to grow when placed near a Wi-Fi antenna. Another shows a teenage girl inEugene, Oregon, testifying that Wi-Fi exposure in her school made her sick.

At Persampire’s house, I met several of the group’s core members,including Fay Tsamis,a real estate manager who tried to convince the local school district to ban Wi-Fi from classrooms.When school officials dismissed her concerns, Tsamistook the enormous step of removing her kids from Wi-Fi exposure to homeschoolthem.

As I talked with these newly minted citizen activists, I wasreminded that modern public health calamities, from asbestos to auto safety toleaded gasoline and tobacco, often follow a predictable narrative. Industrydismisses the health risk, government regulators shrug and look away, and abeleaguered minority is left to sound the alarm. Sometimes, as with theanti-vax movement, they’re proven wrong; but sometimes their warnings are alltoo prescient. According to Persampire, some 200 new antennas, designed tooperate with 5G millimeter waves, have already been built in the Huntingtonmunicipality.

In 2017, numerous signatories of the EMF Scientist Appeal called for a moratorium on the rollout of 5G wireless. Thesescientists were so distressed by the technology’s risks that they invoked theprinciples of the Nuremberg Code regarding experimentation on unwittingsubjects.Our embrace of the wonders of wireless, they said, might somedayprove to be a vast crime against humanity—one in which the telecom industrytreats the public like so many lab rats confined to our personalizedtoxicreverberationchambers.