Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at a new target this week as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda: cell phones in schools.
In an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, Kennedy praised cell phone restrictions in schools and listed health hazards that he said were linked to phone use among children and teens — some backed by scientific research, others less so.
Kennedy cited established links between social media use and depression and poor school performance. But he also suggested that cell phones “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.”
Studies have found that excessive use of social media via smartphones can negatively impact teens’ mental health, elevating their risk of depression and anxiety. Scientists have also long understood that cell phone use in school can lead to poor academic performance, including lower grades.
However, the bulk of research so far has found no association between cell phone use and cancer, nor evidence that cell phones damage DNA. Cell phones emit radio frequency radiation, which has far less energy than ionizing radiation, such as that released by medical X-rays.
Kennedy’s statements follow a pattern of his, in which he mixes misinformation with scientific fact. Some of the issues he has highlighted during his first five-plus weeks in office, such as reducing chronic disease in children and warning of the dangers of ultraprocessed food, have broad support among the public and many scientists. But certain factors Kennedy blames for those problems and some of his proposed solutions — such as substituting beef tallow for seed oils in fast food — are not backed by research.
So, too, for cell phones in schools. Restricting their use is an issue leaders have embraced on both sides of the aisle. Vivek Murthy, while he was surgeon general under the Biden Administration last year, called on schools to get rid of phones in the classroom. Nine states have already enacted such bans or restrictions, and 15 states and Washington, D.C. have introduced legislation to do so, according to KFF, a nonprofit health think tank.
“Both in red states and blue states, there’s a lot of concern about kids and cell phones, so I do think that there is bipartisan support on this,” said Annette Campbell Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.
However, there’s no reason to fear a cancer risk from using your cell phone at this time, said Jerrold Bushberg, a clinical professor of radiation oncology at the University of California, Davis.
“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,” he said. “There are many activist groups out there that promote those studies and say that that’s the truth.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
What Kennedy says, and what studies say
Kennedy has made repeated, unsubstantiated claims about the physical harms of cell phone use in the past, including on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year.
At his confirmation hearing in January, Kennedy also told Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., that he stood by his past statements that WiFi radiation causes cancer, saying that he had “won a case in front of the Court of Appeals against the FCC on that very issue.”
The anti-vaccine group that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s decision not to review its 1996 health and safety guidelines for wireless-based technologies. An appeals court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the FCC to explain how its guidelines protect against potentially harmful health effects. However, that case was about health issues unrelated to cancer, and the court did not take a position on the potential health effects of cell phone radiation.
Research thus far has been “very reassuring” about cell phone safety, Bushberg said.
Most studies have examined whether exposure to radiation from cell phones could increase the risk of brain tumors, given that people often hold their phone by their head while talking. But overall brain cancer rates haven’t risen as cell phones have become more widely used. And a large study among children found no association between wireless phone use and brain tumors.
The National Cancer Institute, Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency — agencies that Kennedy now oversees — have all said there’s not enough scientific evidence to associate cell phone use with cancer. However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic, meaning it cannot rule out a causal link.
Several questions remain, said David McCormick, a biology professor at Illinois Institute of Technology.
“I think it’s fairly clear that Mr. Kennedy doesn’t necessarily pay much attention to the bulk of the scientific data that is out there. That said, it’s not impossible that there are health effects from people using cell phones,” he said.
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 cell phone 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.
Cell phone use has also changed in recent years, McCormick said, which could affect exposure. Whereas studies thus far have mainly looked at the effects of 2G or 3G mobile signals, higher-frequency 5G networks are common today. And people now text as much if not more than they call, so there’s potentially less radiation near the brain.
The pros and cons of cell phone bans
Despite bipartisan support for cell phone restrictions in schools, plenty of disagreement persists as to precisely what those rules should look like.
Phones can have life-saving benefits — for instance, by allowing children to call 911 — so some parents worry that outright bans could jeopardize their child’s safety. Anderson said policymakers have to weigh those concerns against risks to kids’ mental health and their ability to focus in the classroom.
“Part of what schools are trying to do is figure out how to wrest back control over what happened in their school climates because of the phone — everything from using the phone to tape fights and incidents that happen in schools to kids using them to make TikToks,” she said.
The right approach likely differs from school to school, she added — for instance, in schools where cell phones are the only internet-connected device, a ban may make less sense.
In his interview on Thursday, Kennedy applauded Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who last year issued an executive order directing the state’s education department to draft guidance for public schools to restrict or eliminate phone use and set aside $500,000 to fund those efforts. Kennedy visited a Virginia high school on Monday that adopted the change, which he said students and teachers there have welcomed.
“The states that are doing this have found that it is a much healthier environment when kids are not using cell phones in schools,” Kennedy said.
However, prior to becoming HHS secretary, Kennedy suggested that although he personally supports getting phones out of schools, parents and teachers should make their own decisions.
“Do we really want the government to decide when, where, and how we communicate?” he wrote on X in 2023.
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