Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken a first formal step toward possible new rules—or at least new warning labels—on the electromagnetic radiation emitted by cellphones, WiFi routers, and other wireless devices, as the Washington Examiner’s Gabrielle M. Etzel reports. The agency is now soliciting public comment on the health effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) and radiofrequency (RF) radiation, with a report on the findings expected to follow.
The move is the latest chapter in Kennedy’s campaign against cellphone radiation, which he has folded into his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. He told USA Today earlier this year that 5G towers pose “a major health concern,” and HHS has already ordered the FDA to scrub webpages that concluded cellphones are safe.
An HHS spokesman, Andrew Nixon, said the agency removed those pages “while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge”—language that leaves open how far the department might eventually go, from new labeling requirements to tighter exposure limits.
That prospect worries the wireless industry. Telecom analyst Blair Levin of New Street Research has said that “if HHS attempts to force the wireless industry to adopt costly changes to their current operations, we do not see it as likely that the courts will uphold such HHS regulation.”
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Mainstream science still backs the FCC’s existing position that there is no established causal link between wireless devices and cancer. Kenneth Foster, professor emeritus of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, put it more bluntly to Scientific American: “People have been arguing about health effects of RF radiation from cell phones for decades”—with the strongest evidence for harm pointing not to radiation, but to the cognitive toll of excessive screen use itself.
