We don’t all agree on the best way to prevent and treat disease. Even among doctors, there’s a wide range of opinions on the safety and efficacy of various pharmaceutical drugs. But, there’s one idea that should bring us together:

Corporations should be liable for the deaths and injuries they cause, and people who have been hurt, or have suffered the loss of a loved one, should have the right to sue the companies and hold them accountable for deaths and injuries caused by their products.

In 2005, Congress enacted the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), granting the Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to provide legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies, regardless of any mistakes they may make.

The sole exception is “willful misconduct,” which is defined as acting “deliberately to achieve an unlawful purpose, knowingly without legal or factual justification, and with disregard for a known or obvious risk so severe that harm is almost certain to outweigh any potential benefit.” The law established such an extremely high threshold that no circumstances could ever satisfy this burden of proof. Additionally, it prohibited any court from reviewing the Secretary’s decisions granting pharmaceutical companies these liability waivers.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act was unpopular when it was introduced and remains just as disliked today. It contradicts our sense of justice and is unconstitutional, yet we are bound by it until ongoing lawsuits challenging it progress through the courts. However, there is a solution—Secretary Kennedy could use his authority to revoke the current PREP Act declarations that limit our ability to hold corporations accountable.

Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has the power to revoke the current PREP Act declarations. The one for COVID and seasonal flu is in effect until 2029. There are also PREP Act declarations for monkeypox until 2032, for hemorrhagic fevers until 2028, and for pandemic flu, nerve agents, Zika, anthrax, radiation, and botulism until 2027.

The liability waivers are supposed to be for medical countermeasures used in emergencies, but read the fine print and you see that they could be construed to protect the pharmaceutical companies against any use of covered drugs and vaccines. One covered drug, Neupogen, is for radiation sickness. It’s a risky drug that can even be deadly, but is routinely given to cancer patients–and is now being prescribed to women to prevent miscarriage. If anything were to go wrong, people given Neupogen would have no legal recourse.

The PREP Act should either be repealed or ruled unconstitutional. However, until that occurs, Secretary Kennedy should annul all current PREP Act declarations, even retroactively. This would allow victims of pharmaceutical companies to seek justice in court, while paving the way for constitutional challenges to the PREP Act’s provision that prevents judicial review of actions taken by the HHS Secretary.

Something Sec. Kennedy Can Do That We Should All Be Able To Agree On: Revoke the PREP Act Declarations That Take Away Our Power to Hold Corporations Accountable! 

TAKE ACTION: Tell Sec. Kennedy to Restore Our Right to Sue Big Pharma!

Marcia Brown, Politico:

“The Agriculture Department has axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending.

Roughly $660 million that schools and child care facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program in 2025 has been canceled, according to the School Nutrition Association.

The Trump administration’s move to halt the programs comes as school nutrition officials are becoming increasingly anxious about affording healthy food with the current federal reimbursement rate for meals. As food costs have risen in the last few years, more people are turning to food banks and other feeding organizations to supplement their increased grocery bills.”

Read about how feeding children and supporting local farmers are no longer ‘priorities’

William von Hippel, Psyche:

“The comforts, safety and ease of modern existence make most of us the equivalent of multimillionaires by comparison with them, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors were probably happier than we are. How could that be?

There’s more than one answer to this question, but an important part of the story lies deep in our history. Based on evolutionary theory and psychological research, I have come to believe that human evolution has led to a pair of competing psychological needs that must be balanced in order for individuals to experience lasting happiness.

These needs reflect two key goals our distant ancestors had to achieve: to bond with others for their mutual protection, and to develop personal skills to make them valuable to their group and potential mates. In service of these goals, our ancestors evolved two corresponding needs that still drive us today: from childhood through to old age, humans have a need for connection and a need for autonomy.

The need for connection played a central role in human evolution, as it enabled us to cooperate to solve problems that we were too small, weak or ignorant to solve on our own. Hunter-gatherers who couldn’t see the need for connection soon became lion chow. As a result, their tendency to go it alone was largely removed from the gene pool, and their remains served as a vivid reminder to the folks back home that survival requires connection. Genes pushed our ancestors to connect, their cultural rules demanded connection, parental socialization reinforced the message, and daily life reminded them that they couldn’t live without it.”

Read how we may get what we want when we prioritize autonomy, but not what we need and how we rebalance

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola:

“Story at-a-glance

* Over 99% of people worldwide live in areas exceeding WHO air pollution guidelines, and research shows that fine particulate matter air pollution contributes to 20% of global Type 2 diabetes cases

* A 2025 study found that chronic low-dose exposure to traffic-derived air pollution triggers fatty liver disease, causing inflammation, reduced glycogen storage and liver scarring in mice

* Human studies confirm the link between air pollution and liver damage, with exposure leading to significant elevations in liver enzymes

* Air pollution disrupts metabolic health through multiple pathways, including oxidative stress, systemic inflammation and interference with the autonomic nervous system and key metabolic organs

* While outdoor air quality is often beyond individual control, using air purifiers, proper ventilation and water filtration — due to chlorine vapors — significantly reduces exposure to harmful indoor air pollutants”

Learn more about the risks and simple steps you can take to lessen air pollution’s impact on your health

As consumers, we deserve the right to hold corporations accountable for the harm they cause. But a little-known law, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), gives Big Pharma blanket immunity from liability, even in cases of gross negligence.

This is unacceptable.

That’s why we’re calling on Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to revoke the current PREP Act declarations and restore our right to sue pharmaceutical companies for the deaths and injuries they cause.

We feel like RFK will be on our side on this, and with your support we can work together to make this happen!

Your donation will help us mobilize public pressure on Sec. Kennedy to revoke the PREP Act declarations and continue our work advocating for policy changes that hold corporations accountable for their actions.

Please consider donating today to help us work on creating a more just and accountable system.

Thank you for standing with us in this fight!

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

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Bayer, manufacturer of the cancer-causing glyphosate-based Roundup Weedkiller, is working to pass laws across the United States with one intention: to shield them from facing consequences for producing and profiting from a cancer-causing chemical.

Bayer is on the hook for billions of dollars for acting with “malice, oppression or fraud” to hide the fact that the glyphosate-based herbicide the company acquired when it bought Monsanto causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But Bayer has a plan, and it’s a coordinated multi-state strategy to hijack democracy and protect corporations from facing further legal consequences through a series of state-level “Bayer Protection” bills.

Just this week there are committee hearings about these bills in Tennessee (SB 527/ HB 809), Georgia (SB 144), and North Dakota (HB 1318). And bills will soon have hearings in Oklahoma (SB 1078), Idaho (HB 303/HB 1755), and Florida (SB 992/HB 129).

It’s now more important than ever to reach out to your state lawmakers and tell them they need to ban glyphosate, not bail out Bayer!

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State to Ban Glyphosate, Not Bail Out Bayer!

Rebecca Raney, USRTK:

“In 2018, Louis Robert, an agronomist in Québec, was fired after releasing controversial research about the limited effectiveness of neonicotinoid pesticides.

After a year of asking his superiors at the Ministry of Agriculture to release the report, Robert sent the unpublished research to Radio-Canada.

The upshot of the study: That neonicotinoid seed treatments produced no significant difference in crop yields for corn and soybeans.

Shortly after he released the report to the press, while he was in a field giving a demonstration to farmers, Robert’s phone rang. It was his boss’s secretary, insisting that he return to the office immediately.

‘As soon as I got to the office, I was invited to a conference room, and my boss was there, and on the video was his boss in Québec City, and they handed me a letter signed by my ministry,’ Robert said. ‘I was suspended from the department.’

Read about how research was clearly showing that those products were not giving any benefits to farmers and that four more states are moving to limit the use of neonics, in addition to New York and Vermont, eight other states have limited the use of neonicotinoids.

Read New Study: Neonicotinoids Found to Drive Butterfly Declines More Than Any Other Environmental Variable

TAKE ACTION: Tell your state legislators to ban neonic seed treatments!

Jeremie Fant, Urban Botanist and Scientist at Chicago Botanic Garden:

“As an Urban botanist and plant lover, most of my wild plant sightings are of the same aggressive introductions, hanging on in the cracks of the sidewalks. The alternatives are urban gardens, yet most are filled with the same gaudy box-store plants. Don’t get me wrong, I do admire the steadfast dandelion, for its tenacity and beautiful spring colour, and am a huge fan of the wonderful displays of colourful impatiens and petunias that sprinkle our city in summer, and dare I say it, I love the gorgeous red of the aggressive burning bushes each fall. But as a horticulturally trained scientist who spends most of his time studying native species, I know we could do better.

As all passionate about any topic have experienced, knowledge can be a curse. The more you know, the harder it can be to get excited by the everyday. Be it food, cars, architecture, or even plants, whatever you love, we are always aware that things are not always as good as they can be. With over 400,000 plant species in the world, the number I see on my daily walk seems frustratingly low. What is more, I also know that there are always better choices.”

Read about pots, soil and the top native plants for container gardens 
and much more in this helpful article

Frederick Dreier, Outside:

“The National Park Service (NPS) this week revealed that a record-breaking number of visitors toured its sites in 2024. According to the agency’s annual report, the 404 out of the 433 NPS sites that that report data—including all 63 national parks—saw 331,863,858 individual visits last year.

That’s 6.36 million more visits than in 2023 and approximately one million more than the previous record, which was set in 2016 when the park service recorded 330,971,689 visits.

The report went up on the NPS website on Wednesday, March 5; however, the data was not distributed to media in a press release as in previous years. On Thursday, March 6, The New York Times reported that the NPS asked staff in an internal memo not to push the information via a release or social media to the public.

The news comes as the NPS is weathering a staffing crisis after losing approximately ten percent of its workforce since the start of the year. On February 14, the NPS fired 1,000 employees with probationary status—a designation given to all workers in their first 12 months of employment. An additional 700 NPS workers reportedly took early retirement buyouts, further weakening the agency’s staff size.”

Read how NPCA, a nonpartisan group that advocates for the parks, revealed that the agency also plans to cancel 34 leases on buildings operated by the NPS. The collection includes visitor centers, rescue facilities, and offices of law enforcement, and more

Damian Carrington, The Guardian:

“The pollution of the planet by microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesise, according to a new assessment.

The analysis estimates that between 4% and 14% of the world’s staple crops of wheat, rice and maize is being lost due to the pervasive particles. It could get even worse, the scientists said, as more microplastics pour into the environment.

About 700 million people were affected by hunger in 2022. The researchers estimated that microplastic pollution could increase the number at risk of starvation by another 400 million in the next two decades, calling that an ‘alarming scenario’ for global food security.”

Read about how the annual crop losses caused by microplastics could be of a similar scale to those caused by the climate crisis and more

Arty Mangen, Bioneers:

“Through the powerful stories of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers, regenerative practitioners, food activists, and thought leaders, the film series From Soil to Soul charts a path toward food sovereignty — a future where communities reclaim their right to control their local food systems. And by doing so, heal themselves and their communities. The  three creators of this film series, a geospatial data scientist, an expert in sustainability and regenerative strategies, and a multimedia artist and filmmaker, share what they have learned in the process.

Ankur Shah uses satellite data to assess climate hazards and environmental issues, and is the Director of Operations at Mycelium, where he has designed sustainable food systems.

Jahnavi Mange has worked with grassroots organizations, local governments and global corporations to drive equity and environmental impact. Margaret To’s climate activism led her to start Studio SAKA, dedicated to social impact and climate education.

Read more to be inspired: Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviews Ankur, Jahnavi, and Margaret To

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