It's fricking non-ionising RF. TV stations were sending with much more power than the 5g base stations replacing them.
It's not new (em-)radiation, or more of it, it's only a new use, with actually lower sending power than before.
Better turn your WiFi off, if you fear the water heating 2.1GHz radiation.
The FR1 range is nothing new.
Yes, FR2 ranges (aka mmwave) has more potential for higher speeds partly _because_ it doesn't travel through walls, you need practically line of sight. (Spatial multiplexing).
And you cannot simply amp up the power, to get through it as reflections will drown you.
Different use-cases, different frequencies.
And those frequencies are still non-ionising, and at most heat your skin.
So why the qualifier of "safe" for frequencies? We are talking radio here, not UV, x-ray or gamma.
The main problem with multimedia is that they don't have some specialist to cover the news and they just copy&paste the press release of any study floating around. So they make a big scandal about in a study that report like 20 subexperiments and only one of them is statistically significant with p < 0.05.
The assorted things that have burned or exploded when I left them in my microwave oven too long suggest that this is not entirely correct.
Ionizing things is not the only mechanism by which radiation can cause harm. It's the only one known to be able to cause cancer, which seems to be the main thing people worry about, so it would be accurate to say non-ionizing radiation cannot cause cancer.
The non-ionizing ways radiation causes harm also tend to require high intensity and prolonged exposure, so it is probably accurate to say you don't have to worry about them unless you make a habit of, say, hanging out directly in front of high power microwave antennas.
You also realize that a microwave is designed to use a frequency band that sympathetically excites hydrogen atoms, while 5G is a collection of technologies that use UHF, high microwave, and submillimeter bands that do not sympathetically excite hydrogen, right?
Climbing to the top of a 5G antena while it is working and hugging will probably get you a few burns.
I also worked for some months with infrared and green laser that were powerful enough to cause eye damage. And if you want a less technological example, with a glass lens you can concentrate sunlight and burn many things.
Perhaps a better statement would be, "Non ionizing radiation is safe when RF exposure guidelines are followed."
Products from companies in the latter bracket seem to have a history of suspiciously simple backdoors and a record of sending data "back home".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbNh7x3lVWc
My opinion is that we still don't know for sure, and anybody who pretends to be sure about a certain position doesn't have a clue in reality.
The fear is induced by calling electromagnetic waves "radiation," a scary word. If you accurately called these waves "high spectrum light", the fear would evaporate.
The pedantic scientific caution is that our model of electromagnetism may be wrong. Indeed, light may be small demons seeking to enslave us, and only coincidentally behaving in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, but this is unlikely.
And so it is just as reasonable to outlaw rain dances from subsistence farmers in Africa (Our model of cloud formation could be wrong! Who knows what effect these dances could have?), as it is to be worried about 5G.
Myself, I'm looking forward to high resolution, negligible latency VR, as well as no longer having to buy computer hardware: VM's will perform just as well as your tricked out local computer, so it won't make sense to buy computer (or even a smartphone) anymore. The smarts will live in the cloud, and you'll just need a screen, an input device, and a connection to work or game. 5G is coming, so you might as well be excited about it!