Gillian Jamieson’s recent Daily Sceptic article asks ‘How Safe Really is 5G?’ She rightly points out we cannot trust Government assurances that “there should be no consequences for public health”, one of the sad results of the way the Government has behaved during the Covid era. If we wish to form a view about the safety of 5G, we need to look for ourselves at some of the science on the subject.
The electromagnetic spectrum
Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR), as many of us learned at school, is made up of electromagnetic waves which come from all sorts of sources. Old fashioned radio used quite long waves. FM and DAB broadcasting use shorter waves. Television, mobile phones and many other devices use very short waves, some of them short enough to be called microwaves. And then there are short and very short waves, from visible light through to X-rays and Gamma rays. The diagram below indicates the range of this broad family of waves, all of the same type.
How dangerous are the different electromagnetic waves?
Snow storms can come in tiny flecks that you can hardly feel. But heavier precipitation can be larger, up to dangerously large lumps of hail. Electromagnetic waves are similar. Like snow, they come in lumps; they are called photons. Photons come in varying ‘sizes’ (energies). Very long waves on the left of the diagram, longer than the waves that make visible light, come in tiny, gentle lumps. Each individual photon has insufficient energy to break up (ionise) an atom (by liberating its orbiting electrons). So long-wave electromagnetic waves are said to be non-ionising. On the other hand, short waves, from the visible spectrum and above (on the right of the diagram) are like the hailstones. They come in photons large enough to ionise atoms.
Short wavelength ionising waves have dangerous properties because of the large photons. For instance, exposure to sunlight can lead to skin cancer and we know that X-rays and gamma-rays can destroy or damage living tissue.
Long wavelength, non-ionising electromagnetic waves, with their small, gentle photons, behave differently. The individual photons are too small to influence body chemicals directly. If we get enough of them, they can heat it up. When we sit in the sun, or by a radiant fire (coal, gas or electric), we enjoy the feeling of warmth. It’s obviously good for us because we like it. But too much will burn our skin.
Infrared can only penetrate a few millimetres into the body. It will give your steak a brown outside and leave the inside pink. But microwaves can penetrate further, heating to a greater depth and cooking more uniformly. The difference between microwaves and infrared is that microwaves are longer and more penetrating (though lower energy at a given intensity).
Radio waves are further left on the diagram and have longer wavelengths. They can be used for diathermy, to heat deep inside the body and promote healing, as can microwaves. Or, if the intensity is very high, they can cook tissue inside the body and be used, like high energy X-rays, to destroy cancerous tumours.
How does this relate to 5G?
The waves that are used for all mobile phone networks, 5G as much as any other, are all electromagnetic waves and part of this family of waves. Their range of wavelengths lies between the two dotted lines marked on the above diagram. These waves are short radio waves or, if you prefer, long microwaves. There is nothing new about the waves or their effects on living tissue. We’ve been using waves like this since the 1940s.
The waves used for 5G are non-ionising. They are electromagnetic snowflakes, not hailstones. All we know that they can do to human tissue is to heat it up. As for the most powerful 5G transmitter, at 150 watts it is less than a fifth of the power of a domestic microwave cooker and, since 5G aerials are at the top of poles, they are well away from human flesh. By the time they get to you, their intensity is tiny, well below anything that would cause a heating effect. If you want to identify much stronger sources of RF radiation in the home, turn the volume on a normal FM radio up and tune it somewhere between channels to a region on the dial where you just get a hiss. Then hold the radio next to a modern LED lamp. Most LED lights, not all, have electronic switches inside them which chop the mains 240 V supply up very quickly and feed it into a transformer for the lower voltages needed by the light emitting diodes. This chopping process produces RF radiation, which is transmitted everywhere from this type of LED lamp. You will hear the effect of this radiation on the FM radio.
Brains and RFR
Though there has been no evidence of RF radiation affecting body chemicals directly, there is a mechanism by which RF radiation can affect body chemicals indirectly. The physical part of the brain is not very different from a man-made computer, since it is an arrangement of individual components connected electrically. Radio frequency waves affect currents in circuits; that’s how we detect them. RF radiation can disturb the brain and, via the brain’s control on the body, affect body chemistry. The growing brains of children might particularly be affected.
What does it mean to be ‘safe’?
What should we make of the argument that, since 5G uses some waves we haven’t used much before, we should stop the rollout of 5G on the precautionary principle, even though those adverse effects have not, so far, been reliably demonstrated? How safe really is 5G?
It is difficult to find anything that cannot be criticised as being unsafe. We use cars without many worries but they kill people. Are they safe? What about sunlight? As we know, our bodies need it to produce essential vitamin D but it also causes skin cancer. Is it safe? The recent experiments with electric scooters have floundered in some cities because they are considered to be unsafe. Pretty much everything that we use or are exposed to has aspects that we could consider to be unsafe. We can only get a useful idea of safety by comparing the potential risk of RF radiation with other risks with which we are familiar. Readers of this blog are familiar with the risks of Covid and vaccines. It is useful to use these as a rough safety scale – or what I think is easier to think of as an ‘unsafeness’ scale.
For a man between 65 and 70, the chance of dying in the coming year is about 1%. By simple subtraction, his chance of surviving is 99%. So life isn’t safe; it’s 99% safe and 1% fatal for a 65-70 year old. That’s an unsafeness of 1%, or 1 in 100. Most men in that age group consider that life is safe enough, at least to keep most of their savings in the bank for for future years and not to assume that this year is the last.
During the Covid era, mortality for all age groups was about 1.08 times the normal mortality. So the chance of dying for a 65-70 year old went up from 1% to 1.08% and the chance of living dropped from 99% to 98.92%. Covid raised the unsafety of these recent retirees from 1% to 1.08%, which is less than 1 in 1,000. In the early Covid years, 65-70 year olds who had been happily living with life’s unsafeness of 1% had a tiny bit of extra unsafeness to cope with. Of course the danger of Covid is real and unfortunate for those badly affected by it but it is very much less than other dangers we happily live with. For the life of me I couldn’t understand any of the fuss of lockdowns, handwashing and masks.
What about vaccines? How unsafe are they? The NHS website blithely says that COVID-19 vaccination is safe. This bland reassurance from the Government is worse than useless. Vaccines have side-effects, some of which are fatal. A Nature report on the risk of death following Covid vaccination found that, at the worst stages in the process, vaccinated females faced an increase in risk of roughly 1 in 10,000, a figure strongly tinged with the risks associated with the now-withdrawn AstraZeneca vaccine. Clearly vaccines are not ‘safe’ but have a figure for their real unsafeness. The unsafeness of a vaccine is the crucial determinant of whether to vaccinate or not: it makes no sense to vaccinate children against a Covid unsafeness of 1 in 1,000,000 with a vaccine having an unsafeness of 1 in 100,000, part of the reason why the NHS now seems to be promoting vaccination only to the over-75s.
This table gives us a feel of a range of unsafenesses. We notice those things with large unsafeness. We are aware of child accidental deaths but less aware of the ten times less rare pedestrian road deaths.
So is 5G safe?
Of course not. Nothing is. Like everything else, the 5G deployment will have a figure for its own unsafeness. But the evidence for 5G harms is low. Not only do we have no clinching studies demonstrating harms, artificially-produced electromagnetic waves have been in use for a hundred years. 5G is new and obvious but we’ve had television transmitters a thousand times more powerful than 5G for decades. We know from the above table that things with significant unsafenesses are noticeable and we have noticed no noticeable unsafeness so far from any existing RF radiation. To regard 5G as a risk worth worrying about would need a stronger case than Jamieson presents.
If we are still worried?
It is in fact our own phones, not phone towers, that give us the most RF radiation. Imagine having a conversation with a friend 100 metres away. You shout to him, producing a noise for yourself and anyone nearby. Then he shouts back and you hear the tiny little bit of sound left after it has travelled the distance from him to you, only just loud enough to hear him where you are. What is most likely to deafen you – your friend’s shouting or your own?
Well, if you stand by your friend, he won’t have to shout, so your friend won’t deafen you. And if you are a hundred metres away, he may be shouting but he won’t deafen you because you are such a long way away.
It is exactly the same with mobile phones. Our biggest source of RF radiation comes from our own phone as it sends out a radio frequency signal ‘loud enough’ to be received accurately by the phone mast. The phone mast and its equipment does indeed ‘shout back’ electronically, but it continuously modifies the shout and only shouts back with just enough power to be received by your phone. Even if you live close to a 5G phone mast, it’s still some metres away, whereas your phone is a few centimetres away from you. If you want to minimise, or want your children to minimise RF radiation exposure, the further you get from your phone, the better. How do you achieve that?
For a long time the recommendation has been that those who are concerned about RF radiation from mobile phones should use a standard wired headset. That way the distance between the phone and the head of the user is increased from a few centimetres to half a metre or so, making the RF radiation to the brain a thousand times smaller, minimising brain exposure. Ear buds, however, are a source of RFR themselves, since they are wirelessly connected to phones with bluetooth.
In practice, our children have already dealt with concerns about their exposure to phone RF radiation. No longer do the young talk into phones. Try spotting a young person with a phone to an ear. Texting is their way, with the phone well aware from the head. With that increased physical distance, we need not concern ourselves about child exposure to phone RF radiation.
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The real question here is: Why did Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, who have much higher population densities than Western countries, have such low death tolls? Could it be that the reason is that they didn’t artificially inflate their numbers as part of a scaredemic?
All three countries have good reason not to trust China nor believe anything it says. They were also particularly speedy at closing their borders to China. And may already have had a lot of immunity in their populations due to previous exposure to SARS.
Japan’s population also in the main eats a better diet than most Western countries and although it has an elderly population they have high vitamin D levels and therefore their immune systems are well equipped to deal with a virus like SARS-COV-2.
Fair point.
More likely according to Yeadon is their prior exposure to SARS in 2003 giving their population natural immunity. This makes any comparison with Far East countries problematic imo
Fair point.
Comparisons between countries are fraught with difficulty – there are just too many variables involved (including data garbage).
Indeed. Another one of the many sins of govts everywhere is to have been complicit in generating more garbage data making it harder for anything useful to be discovered about covid – their claims to care about public health are hard to take seriously.
I read somewhere that Japan’s % of elders who are obese is minute (4%) compared to UK (29%) and New York (40%). Or something like that. Would be interesting to a graph worldwide plotting obesity rates vs covid deaths.
Yes I was about to say that. There simply are no fat people in Japan. I’ve travelled to Tokyo many times and the population is uniformly lean. It’s not possible to imagine without seeing it!
Sadly no matter what evidence is presented to them people like Ferguson, along with Bojo, Whitty, etc. are never going to admit they got it catastrophically wrong.
Or that they fudged the numbers in order to change the fabric of society?
Ferguson is famous for getting things catastrophically wrong, there is nobody better at turning a drama into a crisis. Yet even with his history of causing untold suffering with his ‘models’, there is absolutely no self-doubt or self-examination, where there should be massive guilt and shame there is arrogance and mis-placed confidence. And all under-scored and approved by Johnston.
It he worked in industry he’d have been sacked for gross incompetence.
However he might then have gone on to become a Consultant (seen it happen)
“…parameterising.”
Thus, not only does Ferguson do incalculable damage to the reputation of ‘modellers’, but to the English language, itself.
True.
Covid is itself a disease of language: safe, surge, social (as in ‘social distancing’), case… and dozens of other words that have been denatured and corrupted by Covid-cult liars.
What is clear is that Kneel is not a scientist but a politician. Lying dissembling, deceiving, calculating to protect himself and not a truth seeker.
Interesting to note, in the spreadsheet, that the lowest modelled numbers of infections/deaths for the UK are when enhanced social distancing of the elderly is implemented. Higher modelled numbers are given for social distancing of the whole population.
The Great Barrington Declaration suggested protecting the vulnerable. The Imperial modelling appears to be supporting that strategy.
Except in this paper
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/77735/10/2020-03-26-COVID19-Report-12.pdf
… with this linked data
https://t.co/yBD0z5rhc4?amp=1
… on 2020-03-26, they made this set of predictions for Sweden.
https://twitter.com/PienaarJm/status/1400699456434102274/photo/1
…
Which forecast for “Enhanced social distancing of elderly” with an R of 2.4, which is what was sampled in Sweden, that there would be 16.1k deaths.
They’ve had 14.5k.
Why continually write articles, basically lying about people’s research?