Pressure Mounts To Retract Grimes RF–Cancer Review

Pressure Mounts To Retract Grimes RF–Cancer Review
Former Director of NIEHS Endorses Removal
microwavenews.com, 25 Jan. 2022

Senior environmental health scientists are calling for JAMA Oncology to retract a review of RF radiation and cancer by David Robert Grimes, a physicist at Dublin City University.

Grimes’s paper, which was posted on the journal’s website on December 9th, has prompted a barrage of complaints to Nora Disis, the editor of JAMA Oncology.

(For background, see Microwave News’ Four Reasons for Retraction, posted last week.)

Among those calling for retraction is Linda Birnbaum, who, for ten years, 2009-2019, was the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Ronald Melnick, who led the team that designed the NTP RF–cancer study, is another harsh critic.

Both Birnbaum and Melnick signed a letter to JAMA Oncology coordinated by the Environmental Health Trust, a group founded by Devra Davis in 2007. In addition to these three, eight others have signed EHT’s call for retraction.

In the letter, they told Disis:

“[T]he review inaccurately presents the current state of science, cherry-picks studies, misrepresents study findings and entirely omits key research studies indicating that cell phone radiation can, and does, cause cancer.”

The letter runs five pages and includes 6 pages of references. EHT appended a 42-page document that catalogs Grimes’s “inaccuracies, mischaracterizations and critical omissions.”

Another of those calling for retraction is David Carpenter, a public health physician who is the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment, part of the University at Albany in upstate New York.

“The article by Grimes should be withdrawn by JAMA Oncology,” Carpenter told Microwave News. “It is factually incorrect and there is no basis for any of the conclusions drawn.”

Carpenter is himself the coeditor-in-chief of Reviews on Environmental Health, a peer-reviewed journal, and was also the coeditor-in-chief of Environmental Pollution from 2015 to 2019. Carpenter has submitted a formal letter to the editor for publication in JAMA Oncology. Letters to the journal are limited to a maximum of 400 words.

“Science and facts don’t seem to matter for some people,” Carpenter told me.

Kent Chamberlin, a professor and chair emeritus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, has told Disis that “the only moral and ethical path forward” is retraction.

Among Chamberlin’s complaints is Grimes’s “use of pejoratives when describing views contrary to his own (e.g., ‘fringe’ and ‘ludicrous’).” These, he wrote, “are routinely used by industry to discredit any publication that reveals harm associated with wireless radiation” and are “not appropriate in scientific publications.”

Joel Moskowitz, of Berkeley Public Health at the University of California, was one of the first to call for retraction, writing to Disis on December 20. Moskowitz is compiling a list of critiques of Grimes’s review on his website, Electromagnetic Radiation Safety.

In 2019, when Moskowitz warned that very little research had been done on 5G and health, Scientific American published a rebuttal by Grimes. (It’s still a mystery why SciAm ran Grimes’s comment; Moskowitz’s column was already a rebuttal to a piece by Ken Foster, who offered assurances of safety.) There too, Grimes resorted to pejoratives: he called Moskowitz a scaremonger (more here).

Support for Grimes from ICNIRP

Martin Röösli, an associate professor of environmental epidemiology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, is one of the few to go public in support of Grimes. In a tweet posted the day after its online publication, Röösli called Grimes’s analysis of the RF-cancer epidemiology literature “state-of-the-art.”

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