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Paper blaming COVID-19 on 5G technology withdrawn:
A paper which argued that 5G cellphone technology could lead to infection with the novel coronavirus has been retracted, but not before scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wondered whether it was the "worst paper of 2020."
The article, "5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells," came from a group from Italy, the United States and Russia, and appeared in theJournal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents. The journal is published by Biolife, which asserts that it's peer reviewed but has not responded to a request for comment.
The abstract is now marked "WITHDRAWN" on PubMed and the paper has disappeared from the journal's website. The abstract has been preserved here.
(Score: 5, Informative) by choose another one on Tuesday July 28 2020, @12:55AM (6 children)
Click through to the archived pdf ( https://scienceintegritydigest.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/fioranelli.pdf [wordpress.com] ) and marvel at figure 5, a diagram that shows the central "thesis" of that paper, namely that 5G EM waves damage cellular DNA and so out pops a fully formed coronavirus.
Why 5G and not 2/3/4G or other existing EM wave sources? Well, it's all about the wavelength see, 5G uses "mmWave" (or maybe will in future, at the moment of course it uses existing spectrum areas repurposed because mmWaves don't propagate very far at all through anything, but lets ignore that little timing problem). Now, mmWave is 1-10mm wavelength, and as the paper says, when the human cell is your antenna:
Because your cells are 1-10mm in size, really, that's why you need a ****ing microscope to see them (actually some parts of neurons are actually very long, obviously, but they are also really really f***ing thin, and the nucleus isn't in that bit anyway).
And there endeth the muppetry, so maybe they were just a few orders of magnitude off in their (pseudo)math?
No chance, because they clearly explain their thesis:
That last sentence is a ROFL, no, really. Damaged DNA bits in cells can join up and hey what d'ya know, there's a virus, and not just any virus, iiiits covid!
Basically they "show" (if you can follow the "math", which I ain't even bothering trying) that if you have a typewriter and get the size wrong by a few orders of magnitude then a lot of 5G monkeys might one day produce a letter.
This means that the existence of the complete works of Shakespeare proves that 5G monkeys are dangerous.
On the plus side, I guess at least the pangolins are ok to come out now...
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:24AM (4 children)
Wow, that is exactly the type of quality I'd expect.
That is the most cancerous, brain damaged logic I've seen from a member of the "scientific" community, if they can be called that.
Some group with lots of money wanted this done I bet. Who stands to benefit from the pushing of this conspiracy idea?
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:40AM
My sister-in-law may well have been having a psychotic episode on Sunday afternoon, our time (she lives on the other side of the world, and was posting to Facebook at 2 am her time).
I am more than half sure she was quoting from this paper. Wow.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @07:42AM
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Authors are just smart enough to slip through the cracks in the system, but they can't actually do science. The world is full of such delluded people, these guys just have the money to pay for publication.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday July 28 2020, @09:43AM (1 child)
>Some group with lots of money wanted this done I bet. Who stands to benefit from the pushing of this conspiracy idea?
I tend to agree, but the bigger question is, where is science? Lancet pubs this, lancet retracts this, Bik disses this retracted paper... This is gossip.
Science is theory -> experiment -> publication -> independent verification or something like it.
As for the theme, I'd rather have personal 5g directional (fixed direction) transceivers and arrange a mesh than 5g towers from the guys (corps and government bodies) who milked us for decades with mobile telephony. Remember the prices for an SMS? remember the balkanization, so your cellphone needs to talk with a faraway antenna instead of the nearest one? If 5g were harmful it's NOT a conspiracy, it is standard operating procedure.
Now we should be ok with this guys emitting waves in any direction, intensity and frequency. Because this is what controlled interference can achieve.
As for the influence of radio waves, I tend to be cautious after personal experiment: every time I fell ill, recovery would be quite slow if I spent recovery time in front of the tv (it was the CRT days, I dumped the CRT TV only recently). YMMV and calculating YM would be actual science.
Finally, IIRC Trump is OK with 5g, as long as it's USA to beam rays around.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:51AM
Well, CRTs emit both ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, both of which are ionizing, so it would make some sense that it didn't do your recoveries any favors.
From what I've seen, I'm skeptical of non-ionizing radiation from radios of various types being harmful enough that it matters. I won't rule out the possibility of minor health effects over very long periods, but I don't think it will e.g. cause cancer or immunodeficiency.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:21AM
My word, he's right! Normal DNA can be broken and converted into a malicious actor! Now all it needs is a delivery mechanism [schlockmercenary.com].