Serious investigative reporters exist and two of them wrote an article for the April 2018 issue of The Nation magazine titled “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: The disinformation campaign — and massive radiation increase — behind the 5G rollout.” Reporters Mark Hertzgaard and Mark Dowie detail how the wireless industry war-games the science while government sits on its hands.

So it’s not investigative reporting when the New York Times issues a 5G-is-safe article crafted in the new Verizon-Times “5G journalism lab.” Readers have to buckle up their cynicism, because these articles are all about promotion. The lab partners are working for industry profit, not public enlightenment.

There is a lot of solid science on wireless radiation exposure within easy access of public and press, and none of it concludes that 5G is safe. 5G has not been safety-tested any more than cellphones, which have made billions for the industry without the expense of making them safe. The Federal Communications Commission allows voluntary compliance with guidelines.

Even the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers, the fraternity of electromagnetic research and development, which set the old 1996 radiation guidelines with ANSI, issued its conclusions about the safety of cellphones in an article last September called “Clear Evidence of Cell-Phone RF Radiation Cancer Risk.” In the article, writer James C. Lin assesses the findings of the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s 19-year, $25 million study on the effects of cellular radiation.

Let me mention the Ramazzini Institute study, which replicated the above NTP research, finding the same results: cancers of the brain, and lesions and malignant schwannomas of the heart tissue in exposed male rats and possible increase in acoustic neuromas and cancer precursors in the adrenal and pituitary glands of males and females — 2G and 3G exposures. The BioInitiative Report tracks up-to-date radiation science. Dr. Martin Pall’s compendium of science reviews, “5G: Great Risk for EU, U.S. and International Health! Compelling Evidence for Eight Distinct Types of Great Harm Caused by Electromagnetic Field Exposures and the Mechanism that Causes Them” backs up and expands on the findings of the aforementioned studies.

The Harvard report “Captured Agency: How the Federal Communications Commission is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates” explains why we can’t count on government. “Re-Inventing Wires: The Future of Landlines and Networks” by Timothy Schoechle of the National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy reports the public cost of wireless in radiation risk, vulnerability to hacking, cybersecurity gaps, private data as a market commodity, and rising energy costs from wireless access networks and planned obsolescence.

As we teach ourselves to live in a way that doesn’t contribute to climate change, we have to consider our invisible wireless radiation immersion as a co-promoter of harm with chemicals and fossil fuels. We need safe technology that promotes the efficiency and sufficiency we need to live in concert with the rest of nature.

We can refuse to be part of a 5G beta test.

Vicki Simpson lives in Ashland.