5G and Health — It’s Time to Get Some Skin in the Game

By Patricia Burke

A cheerful recent pro-industry 5-minute video about 5G (fifth generation) telecommunication invites viewers to look forward to the faster download speeds.  The narrator highlights installation of cell sites and related infrastructure, and the fact that we should get ready to throw out all of our cellphones, because they will all soon need to be replaced.

Not mentioned in the video is the massive exploitation of resources including conflict minerals that will be required, as well as e-waste from millions of discarded cellphones and other devices. [1]

5G Technical Challenges

Meanwhile, in a February 2019 report on the 5G telecommunications rollout in Sacramento, California, ELJ Wireless focused on some of the challenges of the service, which is based on millimeter wave technology that only travels a short range. ‘The author of that report estimated Verizon would need as many as 4,000 5G sites to adequately cover Sacramento.’ [2]

5G Monetization and Customer Adoption Challenges

ELJ just revisited the Sacramento deployment again; issuing a report this week explaining why it believes that Verizon’s “5G Home” may not succeed.

Source: Sacramento CBS13

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – A research firm specializing in media and telecommunications issued an in-depth report this week explaining why it believes Verizon’s 5G Home service may not succeed.

Sacramento is one of four US cities where Verizon began rolling out fixed wireless broadband last October and an analysis conducted specifically in Sacramento by MoffettNathanson Research suggests that nearly six months later, fewer than one tenth of one percent of people living in single family homes here have signed up for the service.

[…]

The report titled “A Peek Behind the Curtain of Verizon’s 5G Rollout” uses data provided by the city of Sacramento under a public records act request combined with the firm’s independent search of 45,000 street addresses using the database on Verizon’s 5G Home website. The database reveals which addresses have or might have 5G service and which addresses have already subscribed.

The research revealed that the 273 small 5G cell sites installed by Verizon under an agreement with the city of Sacramento cover less than six percent of residential addresses in the seven zip codes analyzed — and of those eligible addresses, fewer than half have signed on with Verizon.

[…]

While addressing the technical issues involving Verizon 5G Home, the Moffett Nathanson analysis focuses more on the potential profitability of the service. The report concludes that Verizon’s assumption that wireless broadband is cheaper to deploy than fiber is flawed, and offers a model showing the cost of running fiber to subscribers’ homes system-wide could actually be 64 percent cheaper than installing small cell wireless.

Moffett Nathanson says it was already skeptical about Verizon’s overall chances of earning a positive return on its 5G Home initiative and its analysis of the service in Sacramento has made it even more so.

(It is not known if any of the early adopters in the Sacramento 5G deployment are Verizon employees, or industry or political partners of Verizon, as was the case, in the flawed Worcester National Grid smart meter pilot program in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, adoption of Verizon 5G Home has been underwhelming.)

Majority Involuntary Exposure for Benefit of So Few A Minority?

Extrapolating from Sacramento, is it possible that 100% of the population with be blanketed with small cells necessitated by the desires of one tenth of one percent of the population?

In some cases, those small cells will be installed alongside residential homes, with the probability of lowering property values.

Source: EMF Safety Network

As reported by the EMF Safety Network,

“Small cell” is a junkyard on a pole. “Small cell” towers are not small; they are many feet taller than other telephone poles and loaded with electrical equipment. These photos to the left are of “small cell” towers on Link Lane and Sebastopol Road in Santa Rosa, California. Overloading poles can cause a tower to fall or spark a fire like what happened in Malibu in 2007.[3]

Did those homeowners seeking 5G-connectivity sign up to have the small cell installed in front of their own property?

And in some cases, small cells will be installed in proximity to health-vulnerable individuals who may be forced from their homes. [4] Had the Sacramento citizens been consulted as well as informed about the benefits and risks of the untested technology, perhaps Verizon would have been sent packing?

Here is the Real Reason Why 5G Should Not Succeed: Health Damages

Herein lies the problem with telecommunication industry 5G plans.

Alongside claims of the benefits of emergency surgery and remote medicine, the industry is assuming that human physiology will not notice millimeter wave’s capabilities to penetrate the skin…. as if only the internal organs are of any consequence.

Some scientists disagree.

Acupuncture may also disagree.

In his article, “Acupuncture: The Historical Basis and Its US Practitioners,” Gene George Hong, MD wrote,

Acupuncture was essentially unknown in the United States until President Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s. James Reston of the New York Times was treated for pain after an appendectomy with acupuncture while serving as a member of the US press corps in China.1 His first-person account was widely publicized in the United States. Historically, the discovery of acupuncture was credited to the Chinese Emperor Huangdi in 2500 BC. He also is credited with the invention of Chinese written language and agriculture. The development of acupuncture likely predated Emperor Huangdi and took place during the Neolithic Period, 5000 BC to 6000 BC.

The West’s understanding of the mechanics of the human energy field pales in comparison to the practices refined over thousands of years in ancient China and India. Patients of acupuncture access healing because the needles, which barely penetrate the skin, activate points that have specific properties not recognized or understood in Western medicine.

Lacking an understanding of the skin’s essential role as the mediator between the internal and external environment, the West is being driven by aggressive, market-driven, blind, uninformed techno-optimism.

We have countless examples of technological innovation gone awry, in many cases sourced from industries that withheld evidence of harm, accompanied by lax regulation.

The ‘Miracle on the Hudson’” pilot Capt. Sullenberger made a statement this week about the crash of the Boeing jetliner;

Staffing has not been adequate for FAA employees to oversee much of the critically important work of validating and approving aircraft certification. Instead, much of the work has been outsourced by designating aircraft manufacturer employees to do the work on behalf of the FAA. This, of course, has created inherent conflicts of interest, when employees working for the company whose products must be certified to meet safety standards are the ones doing much of the work of certifying them.”

[…]

‘Boeing, in developing the 737 Max 8, obviously felt intense competitive pressure to get the new aircraft to market as quickly as possible.’

[…]

To make matters worse, there is too cozy a relationship between the industry and the regulators. And in too many cases, FAA employees who rightly called for stricter compliance with safety standards and more rigorous design choices have been overruled by FAA management, often under corporate or political pressure.

Let me be clear, without effective leadership and support from political leaders in the administration, the FAA does not have sufficient independence to be able to do its job, which is to keep air travelers and crews safe. Oversight must mean accountability, or it means nothing.

Source: Barron’s

Telecom companies, unlike Boeing, further control the dialogue about their products through their massive advertising budgets in TV and print news.

If the scientists sounding the alarm about 5G are right, the damage unleashed by lax regulation of Boeing by the FAA, of the sugar industry by the CDC, of the soft drink industry by the FDA, of Exxon and Monsanto by the EPA, will not even approach the damage that is being unleashed by the FCC.

The emergency is that we believe that wireless will make our lives safer.

As noted by Joshua Hart,

The Camp Fire and other recent catastrophic wildfires have revealed the weakness and fallibility of cellular systems in an emergency. There is little doubt that people died because they did not receive timely warnings from a wireless communications network that was already compromised by fire when it was needed most. Let’s learn from this tragedy. [5]

Citizens accepting and promoting narratives about AI, 5G and the IOT in the name of sustainability, or progress, or winning the war against China, or solving the digital divide, including those promoting the Green New Deal’s emphasis on technological innovation, are on the wrong side of ethics, the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.

Notes:

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/13/discarded-phones-computers-electronics-behind-worlds-fastest/
[2] https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/02/11/verizon-5g-sacramento/
[3] http://emfsafetynetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Letter-to-Seb-Verizon-5G.pdf
[4] https://wearetheevidence.org/
[5] http://www.plumasnews.com/what-i-want-the-supervisors-to-know-about-telecom/


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