A retracted paper linking 5G and coronavirus with no evidence is doing the rounds on Facebook
What was claimed
5G millimeter waves could be absorbed by skin cells acting as antennas, transferred to other cells and play the main role in producing coronaviruses in biological cells.
Our verdict
There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. A paper presenting this theory (with no proof) has since been retracted.
A post is spreading on Facebook that contains screenshots of and a link to a scientific paper, which claims 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”.
But the paper provides no proof that this is the case, and it has since been retracted by the journal that first published it.
The paper proposed a mechanism of how this might happen but offered no evidence that this was actually the case. There is plenty of evidence that disproves it, which the paper did not cover.
Vitally, there is no evidence that 5G has anything to do with Covid-19, or is harmful to humans. Covid-19 is caused by a virus that invades cells and takes over their machinery to replicate. It has nothing to do with radio waves, which are what 5G is (and what 4G and 3G were before it).
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The link in the Facebook post is to a version of the paper that was published on PubMed, which is a database of science journal abstracts. If you follow the link, you can see that the paper has now been retracted. In the notice of retraction it says: “This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor. After a thorough investigation the Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article as it showed evidence of substantial manipulation of the peer review.”
We’ve written more about this paper and what happened when it was retracted here.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the claims in the paper are unevidenced and it has since been retracted.
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