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| - Fact Check: American govt DID NOT admit to link between Covid-19 and 5G, old conspiracy theory viral again
An article is going viral on social media with the claim that the US government has finally admitted that 5G radiation is connected to the Covid-19 pandemic. AFWA's probe found that the US government made no such revelation.
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India Today Fact Check
The US government made no such revelations. There is no scientific evidence to link 5G with Covid-19, let alone assert one causes the other.
American founding father Benjamin Franklin once famously said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Had Franklin lived in the age of the internet, he’d definitely have added conspiracy theories to that list. And two particular topics that are plagued with conspiracy theories are 5G and Covid-19.
Unsurprisingly, there are also conspiracy theories that tie both topics. Take for example an article titled, “U.S. Government Admits ‘5G Radiation Causes COVID-19’ – Stunning Admission” that was tweeted by many people in late-January and early-February. The archived version of one such tweet can be found here.
The article claims that the US government has finally admitted that 5G radiation is not only connected to the Covid-19 pandemic, rather, it actually induces the body to create new viruses and illnesses, including coronaviruses. The article further alleged that the US government made these profound revelations in a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the National Institute of Health, the US government responsible for biomedical and public health research.
The article was published on a website called Newspunch.com and was written by Baxter Dmitry. It featured a picture of the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, and a tweet allegedly from the official NIH account, which read: “Exposure to 5G radiation can induce COVID-19 in humans.”
AFWA’s probe found that the NIH did not publish any such revelation. Also, there is no scientific basis for claiming 5G causes Covid-19.
AFWA Probe
We first searched the official NIH Twitter account for the tweet featured in the article. Our search did not yield any results. We then searched for the scientific paper referred to in the article in question and claimed to be published on the NIH website.
We found the research paper does exist. We, however, found a paper authored by Beverly Rubik and Robert R Brown that aimed to "explore the scientific evidence suggesting a possible relationship between Covid-19 and radiofrequency radiation related to wireless communications technology including fifth generation (5G) of wireless communications technology."
The paper concluded, "None of the observations discussed here prove this linkage. Specifically, the evidence does not confirm causation." It further added, "Clearly Covid-19 occurs in regions with little wireless communication. Furthermore, the relative morbidity caused by Wireless Communications Radiation (WCR) exposure in Covid-19 is unknown."
It is noteworthy that the viral claim has been already debunked by Unicef and fullfact.org. The World Health Organisation has also clarified: "Unlike ionising radiation such as X-rays or gamma rays, the electromagnetic fields created by mobile networks such as 5G can "neither break chemical bonds nor cause ionisation in the human body."
Also, similar 5G-Covid-19 conspiracy theories have been afloat since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, including one that claimed that the pandemic was faked to cover up the public health crisis caused by the 5G roll-out in Wuhan in 2019." This was fact-checked, among others, by Politifact.
What is NewsPunch.com?
Newspunch.com formerly known as YourNewsWire, rebranded itself to circumvent fact-checkers. A detailed scrutiny of Newspunch.com (YourNewsWire) suggests that the site has been one of the biggest injectors of conspiracy theories in the world. A July 2018 Poynter report alleges that fake news stories published by this site have been debunked at least 80 times, after being fact-checked by independent fact-checker organisations.
(Written by Vikas Bhadauria)
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