Everyone Is Wrong About RFK Jr. and Cellphones
I agree with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that cellphones probably don’t belong in classrooms. They are likely to distract from learning, to impede socialization, or both.
But Kennedy has a different concern. He recently told Fox & Friends that he’s worried the phones will case “neurological damage to kids” and “even cancer.”
The difference between Kennedy and me—well, there are many, but the key difference for our purposes today—is that I don’t mistake my suspicions about cellphones, socialization, and learning loss for demonstrated scientific facts.
Many other people have criticized Kennedy from a superficially similar angle: Like me, they think there are good reasons to keep cellphones out of classrooms, and like me, they don’t think Kennedy’s reasons are among them. But these critics argue that phones cause depression, anxiety, and other mental-health issues—and like Kennedy, they seem convinced that these concerns have been vigorously borne out by the scientific method.
Yet the claim that cellphones and social media cause mental health problems is also tenuous. RFK Jr. is wrong to be fearmongering about neurological damage and cancer. But it’s not much of an improvement to act as if Kennedy’s fearmongering is whacko while their fearmongering is just Science.
Evidence Could ‘Look Very Damning’
Kennedy told Fox that cellphones “produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it’s around them all day, and to cause cellular damage and even cancer.”
As is often the case with dicey information, Kennedy’s statements aren’t simply pulled from nowhere. Cellphones do emit radio frequency radiation. And while most research finds no association between cellphone usage and DNA damage or cancer, “there’s a lot of low-quality research in the literature that, if you wanted to collect all that and put it together, it would look very damning,” as Jerrold Bushberg, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, Davis, told NBC. “There are many activist groups out there that promote those studies and say that that’s the truth.”
The NBC piece goes on to point to a couple studies which could suggest a link between cellphones and cancer, but it also notes some reasons why these studies might not be reliable or might not apply to humans:
In a 2017 study, McCormick and his fellow researchers exposed rodents to radio frequency radiation and found a possible increased rate of certain tumors. However, findings in lab animals don’t necessarily apply to humans, given the many biological differences, and the studies contained limitations that prevented the researchers from drawing conclusions.
A decade earlier, a study looked at cellphone use among more than 5,000 people with brain tumors and found a possible increased risk of tumors in the 10% who used their phones the most. But the research relied on people’s memories about past phone use, which aren’t always reliable, so its results (like those of similar studies) are hard to interpret.
The National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency “have all said there’s not enough scientific evidence to associate cellphone use with cancer,” reports NBC. But it adds that “the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic, meaning it cannot rule out a causal link.”
“It is true that in 2011 the hyper-precautionary International Agency for Research on Cancer classified cellphones as a ‘possible carcinogen,'” noted Reason‘s Ron Bailey back in 2013:
But as a somewhat snarky response in the Journal of Carcinogenes
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