> I take your point, but calling the comparison "lies" based on the possibility of long-term implications we know nothing about seems like a big stretch to me.
I had gone through my post and removed all the places where I called it "lies" because I intended to say that this arose from ignorance rather than malice, albeit irresponsible ignorance from journalists whose responsibility it is to share information. I must have missed that one, my apologies for the accusation.
> We don't know the long-term effects of 5G either.
Geez, did you get this from Vox too? The bands used for 5G didn't just spring into existence: they've been around and used[1], albeit deployed on much smaller scales than 5G will be. We have long-term data on the effects of adjacent bands, and a few different ways of modeling how electromagnetic radiation affects the body. The data we have is certainly from much smaller deployments than 5G will be, so it's true we don't know all the long-term effects of 5G, but we at least have enough data to put some bounds on how horribly 5G could go wrong. For starters, we know that it doesn't have a 40% chance of killing everyone exposed to it in the next 30 years with lung cancer, because an effect that large would show up even in the more limited data we already have. And if it does turn out to cause some problem with even a minute fraction of that severity, we can turn off the 5G and stop the cause of the problem.
We don't even have a clear lock on the short term mortality rate of coronavirus and we can't stop the spread with the flip of a switch. Where, exactly, is your confidence coming from here?
> If it saves the lives of a bunch of nurses in the process? I don't know—I think I'm cool with a possibility of it, yes.
> Especially when those same people could also catch the virus naturally.
The worst-hit place in the US is NYC, with 141,754 confirmed cases currently. Even if we assume unconfirmed cases 5 times that, we're still talking single-digit percentages of the population infected. And cases are going down. So yes, people could catch the virus naturally, or, as is much more likely, they could not catch the virus, if we continue taking the recommended measures that are working.
Certainly populations like health workers working directly with the infected are at much higher risk than the general population, but there's still a very significant chance they don't get infected. And even if the chance of them not getting infected were negligible, the solution would be to give them proper PPE, training, and other protections, not to say, "Hey you're probably going to get it any way, so let's just deliberately infect you to test vaccines that may not work."
[1] https://ethw.org/Millimeter_Waves