|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 5 November 2018, Erin Elizabeth’s medical conspiracy blog Health Nut News reported a seemingly disturbing story out of the Netherlands with the headline Hundreds of birds dead during 5G experiment in The Hague, The Netherlands. It turned out that Elizabeth's article was the wholesale regurgitation of a series of Facebook posts authored by a man named John Kuhles who runs several anti-5G conspiracy websites and social media pages. Kuhles, who recently suggested that the devastating November 2018 California wildfires were triggered by a direct energy weapon as an act of revenge from the Ruling Elite to punish the state for vetoing a mass 5G deployment plan, tied the factual existence of unexplained bird deaths at a park (Huijgenspark) in The Hague, Netherlands, to a non-existent test of a next generation cell phone network (5G) that Kuhles claimed (without evidence) took place simultaneous with the bird deaths: It is true a series of mysterious bird deaths has occurred at a park in The Hague. According to the municipal government, the birds began to die on 19 October 2018, and soon afterwards those deaths inspired a dog ban in Huijgenspark as a precautionary measure: Testing performed by the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority ruled out West Nile virus and the usutu virus, but it had not yet ruled out other viruses or poisoning as of 12 November 2018. A team of experts will continue to investigate the cause of these deaths: Mysterious bird deaths, though great fodder for conspiracy cranks, are not uncommon. Due to their unexplained nature, they are popular with those seeking to stoke fears or make political or religious points. In 2011, for example, Arkansas, Louisiana, and parts of Sweden were the site of thousands of bird deaths in a short time, which the media dubbed the aflockalypse. Contemporaneous reporting by the Associated Press made it clear that these mass die-offs are quite common and often unexplained: 5G is the proposed 5th generation cellular network, and it is technology that is largely still in development. Various countries have tested forms of it, including The Netherlands, but its widespread adoption is not expected until 2020. We will discuss the technical aspects of 5G compared to existing cellular technology in the next section, but widespread access to this technology is a priority for the Dutch government, and they have performed tests of the technology a handful of times. One such test did occur in an area generally near Huijgenspark, but it took place on 28 June 2018, and it was not followed by a massive bird die-off. For this test, the Dutch equivalent of the FCC provided a one-day permit for the telecommunication company Huawei to use the 5G frequencies needed for the test: No evidence suggests that any other 5G test ever occurred in The Hague or that a 5G antenna was installed near that park conveniently out of view. We reached out via Twitter to the Dutch company NS, the operator of the train station allegedly involved in the 5G test, and a representative told us that they were unaware that recent 5G tests were conducted at this location. A representative of KPN, the largest mobile operator in The Netherlands, told us via Twitter that I can be very clear about this matter; there are no 5G tests in Den Haag. This is a complete hoax. Huawei, the cellular provider who took part in the one-day June test, did not respond to our inquiry about a test occurring, but the Dutch equivalent to the FCC asserted that no such test occurred. It bears mentioning that Kuhles has since walked back his claim that a 5G test occurred at all (though this fact does not appear to have dissuaded Erin Elizabeth from running with her story), and he has now moved the goalposts so far as to claim that perhaps it was just a whole lot of 4G LTE networks getting up in those birds’ business. Either way, from a scientific standpoint his ideas would generously be described as dubious. Promoters of 5G technology promise faster data rates along with reduced energy and financial cost. For the most part, these improvements will come from utilizing higher frequency radio bands and the development of more advanced cellular towers: In Europe, 5G will make use of three frequency ranges: a low-frequency 700MHz coverage layer, a 3.4-3.8GHz band which will be the primary bandwidth, and a super data layer in the higher frequency 24.25-27.5GHz band. This latter range is more theoretical and is not what has been tested in The Netherlands thus far, as the only known test of 5G in the Hague utilized the 3.4-3.8GHz band. Regardless, all of these frequencies fall within a range considered by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (first in 1998 and again in 2009) to be safe: Radio waves used in cellular technology can be described both by their frequency (or wavelength) and in terms of the energy being used to carry that frequency. The aforementioned restrictions refer to limits on the energy carrying a signal, which create exposure limits for various frequencies. Dr. Eric van Rongen, a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands and the Chairman of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, told us via email that the levels of exposure in the 5G frequency range are comparable to existing technology: Even if there would have been 5G exposure, he told us, it is very unlikely that that could cause the [bird] mortality. One of the great benefits to being a conspiracy blogger, outside of the fact that copy and pasting a Facebook post counts as reporting and that objective reality need not be considered, is that you don’t really need to follow up or correct yourself even when the person pushing a given conspiracy completely changes his tune. Erin Elizabeth’s post, which has been shared well over 125,000 times on Facebook, included all of Khule’s posts on the subject up to 2 November 2018. But on 8 November 2018, Kuhles posted again, appealing to his own authority while making sure everyone knew he wasn’t really all that serious about that whole 5G thing in the first place. He brushed off factual criticism by calling his doubters sheeple and capitalizing certain words to make the letters LIE more prominent: As compelling as this kind of testimony may be to Erin Elizabeth’s Health Nut News, the facts are this: No 5G test occurred during the time that the mysterious starling deaths occurred, and the only person suggesting otherwise is someone with a vendetta against both objective reality and 5G wireless. Even if a 5G test had occurred, however, no mechanism exists that would explain how it could have affected starlings at all, let alone only starlings and no other birds or animals in the region.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}