PubMed Leaps Into Pseudoscience, Links 5G, Coronavirus

PubMed is a free life science and biomedical database anyone can search to find papers published on various topics. It's been free to the public since 1997, and it's often referenced by people looking for recent medical studies on a given topic. Because it's a search engine used by both the general public and medical professionals alike, the decisions PubMed makes about which content to surface in response to a query are incredibly important. Generally, the site has been viewed as a reliable way to find genuine medical information rather than pseudoscientific claptrap.

Unfortunately, that's not as true as it used to be, as evidenced by the recent appearance of this gem: "5G Technology and Induction of Coronavirus in Skin Cells(Opens in a new window)." The paper is currently online in preprint and awaiting publication.

It makes pretty much exactly the argument you think it does.

Rabbit, Meet Hole

We're going to be talking about credentials a lot in this story, so let's start with mine. I'm a 19-year veteran of technology reporting who graduated with a political science degree from DePauw University. Jessica Hall, who has written for ET before and has degrees in both biology and mathematics, was gracious enough to help me evaluate both this paper and several others by the various authors we'll be discussing.

This raises the obvious question: Is an undergrad-level journalist capable of evaluating the deep and sophisticated science of a group of COVID-19 researchers? No. Fortunately, I'm not being asked to. All I have to do is illustrate how an organization that's given up on safeguarding its own reputation can be used to carry water for conspiracy theorists and the lunatic fringe.

So let's get started. Here's the first sentence of the abstract: "In this research, we show that 5G millimeter waves could be absorbed by dermatologic cells acting like antennas, transferred to other cells and play the main role in producing Coronaviruses in biological cells." (Emphasis added)

If 5G actually played the main role in producing coronavirus, you'd expect the countries with the highest 5G deployments to have the highest cases of COVID-19. The United States is the undisputed world leader in the latter category, yet our 5G mmWave coverage (and that's the type these authors identify as harmful) is so bad, Verizon just got in trouble for claiming its 5G network is "nationwide" and was forced to change its advertising(Opens in a new window).

If 5G causes coronavirus, the worst outbreaks of coronavirus should directly correlate to the places where 5G networks exist. They don't. They generally correlate to cities (with a few exceptions, such as rural Italy) because urban areas have always been at greater risk during pandemics due to population density and, historically speaking, the difficulties of dealing with sewage treatment, disease, and corpse disposal anywhere humans lived in large numbers.

For examples, see: The Antonine Plague(Opens in a new window), the Plague of Justinian(Opens in a new window), and the historical spread of the Black Death(Opens in a new window) following its arrival in Constantinople.

Regarding 5G frequencies, the "scientists" claim(Opens in a new window): "Its frequencies are above 24 GHz, reaching up to 72 GHz, which is above the extremely high frequency band’s lower boundary."

Low Frequency Medium Frequency High Frequency Very High Frequency Ultra High Frequency Super High Frequency Extremely High Frequency Visible Spectrum. Ultraviolet X-ray Gamma Ray

Remember that time you turned on an infrared lamp in your bathroom and it gave you cancer? No? Huh. Must be all the cell phones rotting your brain. The fact that all of the damaging energy known to harm humans is sitting above visible light while everything known not to be harmful is sitting below it, including 5G signals, is surely some mistake.

But this team of sciency folks isn't just using scary language -- they're blatantly misrepresenting the actual bands that mmWave 5G deployments use. Here they are:

This Is What Bad Scientists Think Science Looks Like

It has been shown that 5G mobile networking technology will affect not only the skin and eyes, but will have adverse systemic effects as well. In another study, it was argued that 5G technologies cause great harm to human health. Cancer is only one of the many problems. 5G causes 720! (factorial) different diseases in human beings, and can kill everything that lives except some forms of microorganisms (12).

The intent of this article is to show that wireless technology is, without remedy other than termination, one of the most devastating environmental and health threats and threats to personal liberty ever created.

The question is whether millimeter waves in 5G technology could contribute in constructing some viruses like COVID-19 within a cell. To reply to this question, we should consider the electronic structure of a DNA and its emitted waves.

With respect -- and this bit, I explicitly ran past Ms. Hall -- that is not the question. The question is whether any radio wave or signal has been shown to help any type of virus colonize the human body. The answer, up until the torrent of stupidity that is the 5G-coronavirus conspiracy theory, was no. And since the 5G-coronavirus conspiracy theory is literally ascientific bullshit, the answer remains no. Viruses turn human cells into factories to replicate more of themselves. This is literally how viruses work. A virus that requires a radio signal as a vital intermediary (which is what the authors' claim, given that they identify 5G as "play(ing) the main role") is a shit virus.

Imagine a bacteria that could only kill you if you like Nickelback. There are not enough Nickelback fans for that to be an effective evolutionary strategy, yet there are somehow far more Nickelback fans(Opens in a new window) in the United States than people living in range of effective 5G service.

Let's Talk About the Credentials of the Author... and the Publisher

The university he teaches at, Marconi University, has the dubious distinction of being accredited by the ACICS, a US accreditation agency so corrupt, its authority was revoked until Betsy DeVos reinstated it. Since that decision, a USA Today investigation(Opens in a new window) has found that Reagan University, an ACICS-accredited school, has no students, no buildings, no faculty, and no alumni.

Other papers Professor Fioranelli has collaborated on include "A Mathematical Model for the Signal of Death and Emergence of Mind Out of Brain in Izhikevich Neuron Model,(Opens in a new window)" which claims to present evidence that Cartesian duality -- namely, that the mind and brain are entirely separate constructs -- is scientifically valid. He's also a credited author in the page-turner coming to a budget TV network near you: "Formation of Neural Circuits in an Expanded Version of Darwin's Theory: Effects of DNAs in Extra Dimensions and within the Earth's Core on Neural Networks.(Opens in a new window)"

"Awareness of Psychodermatology in Indian Dermatologist(Opens in a new window)." "Psychodermatology in Iran: A Survey on Knowledge...(Opens in a new window)"

The idea that stress can contribute to skin problems is not controversial. But psychodermatology typically goes farther from painting stress as a factor and identifies it as something more akin to a primary agent. This latter idea is not well-supported in the scientific literature. (Have you noticed that most of these people seem to be dermatologists yet?)

None of these authors has the standing or authority to speak to the causes of COVID-19, and the fact that this paper has appeared in the PubMed database or been linked by the NIH is evidence of serious methodological flaws in the approval process. This isn't science. It's what people who don't actually practice the scientific method appear to think it looks like.

Some of this can be excused by the overwhelming nature of the COVID-19 epidemic and the need for all scientific nooks and crannies to be explored, but even a cursory investigation into the history of the organizations and individuals publishing this work demonstrates how profoundly counter-factual it is. If you want serious scientific advice, don't get it from people who speak and refer to grand, sweeping assumptions as though they were proven scientific fact. And if you run into any AIs near the Earth's core, make sure to check that they remain in the usual four dimensions.

If you run into any dermatologists pretending they have the qualifications to moonlight as signal engineers and infectious disease experts outside the explicit realm of dermatology, kindly do us all a favor and tell them to shut the fuck up.

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