The Food and Drug Administration's webpages reporting that cellphones don't cause cancer and other health hazards have been taken down. This comes as the Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is launching a new "study" on the health effects of cellphone usage. Under Kennedy's leadership, the anti-vaccination advocacy group Children's Health Defense sued in 2022 and lost a case against the Federal Communications Commission asserting that cellphone towers caused deleterious health effects. In 2022, Kennedy tweeted that "a growing body of research that calls cellphone safety into question."
Since cellphones tend to be held close to users' heads, brain cancer is one of the main concerns for alarmists like the current HHS secretary. The vast majority of research has concluded that there is essentially no correlation between cellphone use and cancer incidence.
The National Cancer Institute has a great summary of these studies. Given what's happened to the FDA webpages, you might want to read the data while you still can.
Let's just take short statistical journey comparing U.S. cellphone usage and cancer incidence trends. In 1995, only about 33.8 million Americans used cellphones. By 2025, 98 percent of adult Americans owned a cellphone. As cellphone usage skyrocketed, the overall cancer incidence rate for Americans has fortunately marked a slow but steady decline.
What about brain cancers? A June 2025 study in Environmental Research and Public Health citing U.S. brain cancer incidence data from 2000 to 2021 reports that "mobile phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of brain cancer, either malignant or benign." Another 2025 study parsing data over the same period in Neurology also found that "brain tumor incidence has shown a gradual decline since its peak in the early 2000s." (The only exception is that brain cancer incidence has slightly increased among American Indians.)
Next up: Federally funded research on the efficacy of beating dead horses?
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