No, 5G Is Not Causing Coronavirus (or Anything Else)

The false, superstitious belief that 5G cellular networks are somehow causing a global health crisis has found a new conspiracy theory: the idea that the global coronavirus pandemic is caused by 5G. It is not.

Since I originally wrote this, 5G conspiracy theories have turned violent. Anti-5G conspiracy theories have fueled 5G tower arson attacks. According to The Guardian, they’re driven largely by viral Facebook posts, often from groups mixing in anti-Semitic slurs and conspiracy theories about 9/11. The New York Times suggests a Russian-backed propaganda campaign is in part to blame.

A petition on Change.org claiming that “60 megahertz waves” would “suck the oxygen out of our lungs” (it won’t) got more than 114,000 signatures before it was deleted. 

In the US, the conspiracy theories were prominently promoted by Keri Hilson, an R&B singer who for some reason has 4.2 million Twitter followers and 2.3 million Instagram followers. She has since deleted the tweet (“Management has asked me to delete vid/articles,” she wrote in a follow-up tweet) but apparently got it from someone with 839,000 Instagram followers going by “chakabars,” from a completely random chiropractor named Gloriane Giovanelli, and from the Wikipedia quick-fact snippet appearing on a search for “Who invented 5G?'”

Hilson’s most striking source is a completely insane video, which she posted to her Instagram, where a man with his name tag turned backwards claims that the 1918 flu pandemic was caused by the invention of radio, some undescribed pandemic during World War II was caused by “Radar fields,” and a 1968 flu in Hong Kong was caused by “satellites emitting radioactive frequencies.”

Keri Hilson tweet

“In the last six months, with the electrification of the Earth … it’s called 5G,” the unnamed man says, going on to spout more utter word salad, including “the first completely blanketed 5G city in the world was … Wuhan, China.”

Hilson is not the only celeb to spread 5G coronavirus nonsense on social media. As the Times notes, John Cusack and Woody Harrelson have done the same.

The Truth About 5G

5G isn’t a new, higher frequency. It’s just an encoding standard, which can work on many kinds of airwaves. In the UK and China, 5G operates on a band that’s sandwiched between existing 4G networks and 5GHz Wi-Fi. That band is extremely similar to current LTE bands in behavior, and it is lower-frequency than the band used for high-speed Wi-Fi since 2009.

Most of the 5G out there—including the 5G used in the UK—is just a slightly different way of encoding data on airwaves that are no higher-frequency than those used by Wi-Fi, and no lower-frequency than those used by televisions. 

Here in the US, most of the “5G” you see is just a slightly different form of encoding on airwaves that have been used for nearly 100 years. T-Mobile’s low-band 5G is on old UHF TV channels. UHF TV did not cause coronavirus. AT&T’s low-band 5G is on cellular frequencies used since 1983, and it is no more powerful. Sprint’s 5G is on 4G frequencies that have been used since 2007.

Yes, some new, higher frequencies—called millimeter-wave (mmWave)—are being used in the US (not the UK), but they have almost no coverage right now, much as Verizon’s marketing would like you to think otherwise. Even though you probably have never encountered it, because it has almost no coverage, mmWave 5G has been certified as safe by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. The technology has been studied for several years now, with the only negative effects detected being a slight heating effect at power levels far above what the FCC permits any transmitter to operate at. 

Citywide 5G was also available in the US and the UK before it was available in China. While China did indeed launch 5G in 50 cities on Nov. 1, UK carrier EE launched 5G last May, and Sprint launched broad-coverage 5G in nine US cities last summer (which we covered.) The US and UK have been “blanketed” with 5G for months longer than China has.

COVID-19 is spreading in places that do not have 5G. Iran, a major hotspot, does not have 5G. Malaysia, another hotspot, does not have 5G. And so on. There is no correlation between increased spread and the presence of 5G. Italy has 5G and the virus went wild; Iran does not, and the virus went wild.

Debunking That Dumb UK Petition

The specific Change.org argument in the UK seems to be related to a recent news story about the 60GHz band (not MHz) being approved late last year for unlicensed 5G use in Europe. But that band was approved for, and has been used for, unlicensed networking technologies since 2009. The only new move was to add one encoding standard to the list of existing standards available at 60GHz.

No 5G network is currently using 60GHz or has plans to do so in the near future. But 60GHz networks have also existed for quite some time with no damage to anyone. The “Soli” feature in the Google Pixel 4 uses 60GHz. The frequency is the basis of the WiGig file-transfer technology, which has appeared in some laptops and phones since 2016. And 60GHz has been used as a metro-area internet backhaul transmission frequency for a decade now in places like Courtenay, BC. If there was an inherent problem with 60GHz, it would have shown up in one of those applications, but it hasn’t.

For more, Phone Scoop has a simple explainer as to why 5G networks are safe overall.

Stay safe, folks. Stay inside. Don’t listen to craziness.

Editors’ Note: This story was updated on April 13 with details about the arson attacks.

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