Jill Stein: ‘We Should Not Be Subjecting Kids’ Brains’ to Wi-Fi

Green Party Leader Irresponsibly Dabbles in More Unsubstantiated Fear-Mongering

Jill Stein says parents and schools should not be exposing children to wi-fi and to TV or computer screens. The presumptive nominee of the Green Party who uses anti-vaccination activists’ fears as a sword to attack credible public institutions then falsely claims Americans hold an inherent and understandable distrust of government entities like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is also coming out against the very methods used to research her claims.

In a video posted to YouTube in March by a Maryland blog that advocates against “Industrial wireless systems in schools,” Dr. Stein (she has a medical degree from Harvard and reportedly practiced internal medicine for a quarter-century) responds to questions from parents about computers and wi-fi.

Tech site Gizmodo, which notes, “wi-fi has not been shown to harm humans in any way,” on Monday posted this transcript:

Person from crowd: My school district is rapidly moving towards one-to-one computers. Can you speak to the health issues? [inaudible with clapping]

Jill Stein: Wonderful, health issues… social issues… you name it. But to be staring at screens… we already know that kids who get put in front of TVs instead of interacting, this is not good in all kinds of ways. And it’s just not good for their cognitive, it’s not good for their social development, I mean, that is incredible that kids in kindergarten… We should be moving away from screens at all levels of education, not moving into them. 

And this is another corporate ruse. This is another gimmick to try to make a buck. To make big bucks in fact. And education, and teachers, and communities suffer. So we need to stand up to that.

Person from crowd: What about the wireless?

Jill Stein: We should not be subjecting kids’ brains especially to that. And we don’t follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless—maybe not good enough, because it’s very hard to study this stuff. We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die. And this is like the paradigm for how public health works in this country and it’s outrageous, you know.

Stein goes on to falsely claim yet again, “people don’t buy what our regulatory agencies are telling us, we’ve completely lost trust in them.”

Watch:

Last week Dr. Stein announced that people have “real questions” about vaccines and claimed the general public’s level of “strong confidence” in regulatory agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is “somewhere around four percent,” which NCRM reported as false. Based on our research, just after the 2014 Ebola crisis 50 percent of Americans said the CDC is doing an “excellent” or “good” job, which was down from 60 percent in 2013.

Stein’s comments, which appeared in a Washington Post interview, forced her to post this tweet:

But as NCRM reported last week, while Stein isn’t anti-vaxx, she feeds off the false beliefs of anti-vaxxers to build her base. She sows seeds of doubt and mistrust in the safety of vaccines to tear down government institutions, then positions herself as the only one who can fix these “issues.” Over the weekend Stein actually deleted a tweet she had just posted, which said, “There’s no evidence that autism is caused by vaccines,” and replaced it with one that reads: “I’m not aware of evidence linking autism with vaccines.”

Which once again proves Stein is feeding off the anti-vaxx crowd to build her base.

And which sounds glaringly like the Republican nominee for president’s tactics.

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license