Now RFK Jr Wants To Launch An Investigation Into Cellphone Radiation. Here's What We Know

“Generally speaking, electromagnetic radiation is a major health concern,” Kennedy told USA Today in a misinformation-laden interview last week. “I’m very concerned about it.”

In fact, so worried is the HHS Secretary about WiFi, 5G, and other RF radiation that his department is now launching a study on the safety of cellphone use. So what do we know about RF wave radiation and cellphones? Are they really as dangerous as RFK Jr believes? And can’t we all just buy those anti-RF amulets to keep ourselves safe?

What RFK Jr says about RF radiation

Kennedy has a long history of promoting anti-RF ideas. Starting in 2019, he became an avid poster of false and, frankly, weird claims about 5G technology: “It causes cancer,” he told The Globe and Mail in 2020. “It causes DNA dysfunction. It penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It’s making our children stupider and sicker.” (He would later repeat the claim about the blood-brain barrier on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience in 2023; when asked how such an effect could work, he declined to comment.)

Not only that, but 5G is being used “to harvest our data and control our behavior,” he told a dinner party in 2023; under his eight-year tenure as chair and chief litigation counsel of anti-vaccine activist group Children’s Health Defense, the group launched one anti-cellphone crusade after another, including a 2020 lawsuit against the FCC to “seek justice for parents of kids who have suffered health impacts from wireless radiation,” Kennedy said at the time.

Kennedy stood by these beliefs even in his Senate confirmation hearings, where he reiterated claims that WiFi “does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer,” and EF radiation “changes DNA” (as well as unspecified “other things”). Since taking charge at HHS, he has praised cellphone bans in schools, citing both the (generally accurate, though nuanced) links between social media use and worse mental health in young people and the (totally unproven) “neurological damage […] cellular damage and even cancer” caused by RF radiation.

All of which leads us to now, and the announcement by HHS of new research into the effects of cellphone radiation. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is controlled by HHS, is quietly removing webpages informing readers that their phones are safe; scientists and advocates whose views align with Kennedy’s are being approached for the upcoming project, per the Wall Street Journal. The department has reportedly set aside $1.5 million for the effort.

So, what should we expect an investigation to find?

What the science says about RF radiation

Just like Kennedy’s other major anti-science bugbear, there is already a wealth of scientific inquiry and investigation into the potential harms of RF radiation. Rather unlike the case with vaccines, however, the results are not necessarily as conclusive as you might think.

It’s a “complex subject,” Kenneth Foster, a professor emeritus of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, told Scientific American on Friday. “People have been arguing about health effects of RF radiation from cell phones for decades.”

It is true, for example, that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – part of the World Health Organization – classified EF fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011; it’s also the case that some scientific studies have linked exposure to RF radiation with a possible increased risk of tumors – though arguably not the “10,000 […] that’s not hyperbole 10,000, including a $28-million study,” that RFK Jr touted to The Globe and Mail. 

But those statements come with heavy caveats. First, “possibly carcinogenic” doesn’t mean what it sounds like – it certainly doesn’t mean “carcinogenic” or even “probably carcinogenic”. As a reference, other things the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has assigned the same risk include such hazardous substances as ginkgo, aloe vera, and pickled vegetables.

And the studies suggesting a tumor risk from RF radiation are often based on animal studies – not easily applicable to humans, and indeed the authors of such studies rightly note the limitations of their work for informing health policy. If not that, then they rely on self-reporting of phone use after the fact – which, as anybody who’s ever tried to recall precisely what they ate last week can attest, is not a recipe for accuracy. 

But a far more convincing argument for the safety of cellphone use is the sheer wealth of studies finding no connection between RF radiation and tumor risk at all – particularly not at the levels most of us are being exposed to. Claims of a cancer link is “not supported by the current evidence base,” reports one 2021 review of both the evidence and potential biophysical mechanisms; “near field RF-EMF exposure […] likely does not increase the risk of glioma, meningioma, acoustic neuroma, pituitary tumours, and salivary gland tumours in adults, or of paediatric brain tumours,” concludes a 2024 analysis, commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO), of more than 60 studies on the potential link between cellphone use and various cancers.

“If we're talking about these major health concerns, I think we have the answer pretty much,” Timothy Rebbeck, professor of cancer prevention at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told CNET in 2024.

And all these results make sense from a biological and physical standpoint, too. Put simply, not all radiation is made equal: strong (or ionizing) radiation, like gamma rays and X-rays, can indeed cause cancer and death from radiation poisoning over the course of weeks or even days – but weak radiation, emitted by things like cellphones, power lines, and microwave ovens, is approximately a billion times less powerful. 

“Biologically speaking,” then, Rebbeck said, there’s little to worry about. The waves coming out of your cellphone “[is] radiation, but it's not the kind of radiation that really causes cancer.”

“The only setting in which nonionizing radiation is really known to cause cancer is Sun exposure,” he added. (As an aside, RFK Jr is well-known for his frequent use of tanning beds – which emit 12 times more UVA radiation than the sun.)

What’s likely to happen next

So, is the upcoming investigation a moot point? After all, as the FDA itself still says, if you look for it, “The weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phone radio frequency radiation with any health problems.”

Well, we’ll see. After all, HHS has already announced some spurious and agenda-driven claims – acetaminophen and autism, for example – so, unfortunately, it’s no longer the case that we can assume science will out. And hey, we’ll be fair: maybe the department really will uncover some incredibly strong evidence that cellphone radiation has been killing us all over the past 25 years or so, and neither science nor the public at large ever noticed. It’s possible.

But for some experts – including those on Kennedy’s side in this fight – the most likely outcome is more cynical. After all, the second Trump administration has long backed loosening regulations on the nuclear industry, including the restrictions on permissible radiation levels – it’s even listed as a goal in Project 2025 – and nuclear radiation pretty famously falls into the dangerous, ionizing zone that can make people sick and die. 

With that in mind, the new investigation “[is] not going to result in very much in terms of regulatory change,” Joel Moskowitz, a public health professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who actually supports Kennedy’s antipathy to the accepted wisdom on cellphone radiation, told The Wall Street Journal. (In an amusing twist, Moskowitz was asked to participate in the study, but declined because of Kennedy’s stance on vaccines.)

“They’re just doing this to kick the can down the road,” Moskowitz said, “because the rest of the administration is in a deregulatory mode in terms of this technology.”