Where can I find the video about 5g causing covid by Dr. Cowan?

April 21, 2021 3:41 AM

I am a medical student and obviously do not believe 5g causes coronavirus, but I want to better understand this conspiracy theory that a patient I care for has talked about. Where can I find this full video?
posted by maxexam to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: It's on this Facebook page, which can be accessed without a Facebook login, i.e. through a private window. I don't know if this is the "full" video, but it's 32 minutes.
posted by essexjan at 4:33 AM on April 21, 2021

Debunked here.

"He is currently operating on probation with the medical board in California and has limits on his practice after a 2017 complaint to the state medical board that, among other things, he had offered an unlicensed drug to a breast cancer patient without informing her it wasn't approved for use.

He also never saw the patient in person nor did he review her full medical file, according to documents from the Medical Board of California detailing why Cowan was to be disciplined."

Full disclosure: He is my cousin. He was a cute, sweet kid, but as a physician he's always been something of an outlier.
posted by Dolley at 7:20 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately, there are MANY versions of this nonsense floating around back when COVID was REALLY scary. There were 3 leading theories, none of which matched each other:

A) 5G poisoned the cells, creating COVID virus. There was no person to person spread.

B) 5G weakened the immune system allowing COVID to spread

C) COVID virus can travel via 5G transmissions to infect people (WTF?!)

Cowan's video went viral after being shared by Keri Hilson and various other celebrities in March or April of 2020.

According to NYT, "5G = illness" was spread by a Russian Media company called "RT" in Spring 2019. The same media company was implicated in meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Elections.

So it's NOT unreasonable to find conspiracy theorists took that idea and went nuts with it. They got fooled by Russian trolls out to undermine the entire US infrastructure.
posted by kschang at 7:54 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Gah, forgot to put in reference link. The 3 theories came from this article in France24:

https://observers.france24.com/en/20200413-dangerous-conspiracy-theory-linking-5g-covid-19
posted by kschang at 8:01 AM on April 21, 2021

Apparently Cowan's speech was recorded at an antivax conference headlined by Andrew Wakefield (I haven't been able to verify that). It was spread by famous antivaxxer RFK jr which was then picked up by other conspiracy theorists.
posted by kschang at 9:05 AM on April 21, 2021