Today I Learned: The 5G Conspiracy Theory Was Started by Russian Trolls

Looking back at 2020, there was a flood of crazy conspiracy theories linking COVID to 5G, and some of them stated that...

• COVID was not spread from person to person. Instead, 5G radiation caused the body to create the COVID virus
• 5G radiation weakened the body's immune system thus allow COVID to infect
• COVID virus was spread via 5G radiation (?!)

You can blame a bunch of clueless celebrities, such as Keri Hilson (who needs to stick to singing) falsely spreading claims that 5G caused COVID, by making casual observations that China rolled out 5G then BAM! COVID.  She and various celebrities forgot an important lesson in science: correlation is NOT causation 

The debunking is TRIVIAL... Iran, which has no 5G, is also a major cluster of COVID. How do you explain that? Hmmm? 

But did you ever wonder, who STARTED this nonsense anyway? Let's do a little tracing. 

Hilson spread a video by Dr. Cowan who's also against 5G. What nobody checked was Cowan was under probation by California medical board. The video was a talk by Cowan at an anti-vax conference headlined by none other than disgraced ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield. When it was shared by anti-vax RFK jr, it's enough to make the rest of the conspiracy theorists like David Icke jump in with their own copycat take on the disinfo. 

And before you think this is harmless, ALMOST 80 5G towers in UK were attacked in 2020, and several phone carrier employees hospitalized due to attacks in the UK. Canada also had reports of several phone towers damaged. Sad part is none of them were actually 5G towers.  Tennessee believes several state-owned towers were damaged by COVID conspiracy theorists. And the damage may be far more widespread than suspected. 

Cowan is hardly the first to make wild claims. The first doctor to make such a claim was a Dutch doctor by the name of Kris Van Kerckhoven, a general practitioner, in January 2020. His interview was published in a local paper that claimed 5G is dangerous, without proof. He then suggested there may be a link between 5G and COVID, which had just appeared in Wuhan, Again, without any proof. But it was enough to get the conspiracy theorists rolling. 

When there isn't that much known about COVID during February and March of 2020, various conspiracy theorists started flooding the net with "the truth about COVID" and it got past the sanity filters of the search engines, and started to, pardon the pun, gone viral. 

But who was the first to claim 5G causes illnesses? 

Turns out, it was a Russian troll news outfit called "RT News". And it started as early as January 2019, a whole YEAR before COVID really affected the world. 

As tracked by Wired and NYTimes, RT had repeatedly posted videos containing baseless rants about 5G, including statements such as "it might kill you" "health risks" and even claims that children exposed to 5G incurred brain damage, about 10+ times in 2019 alone. Yet there seems to be no particular reason for it other than to delay the global rollout of 5G so Russia can catch up. 

So there you have it: anti-vax idiots trolled by Russians. 

In other words, double idiots.