Empowering Health Autonomy

Informed consent means that patients and consumers have a right to know what they are putting into their bodies and what possible effects this decision will have on their health.

All known harms or side effects of any medication or procedure should be made clear to patients including available data on emergency use medications.

Drug manufacturers should be required to release ALL studies conducted on a medication not only the studies that have favorable results.

Consent also means that patients have a right to say no. Employers and Government should not mandate any medication or procedure.

We support HB 617, The Constitutional Right to Medical Freedom Act which gives all Pennsylvanians the right to refuse any procedure, treatment, injection, vaccine, or prophylactic. it also ensures that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged” because of a person’s medical decisions.

Every few years, Congress puts forward a package of updates to USDA regulations know as the Farm Bill that effects agricultural policies, the SNAP program, and USDA funding.

Despite being scheduled, the Farm Bill was not updated by Congress last year. Language in the proposed bill could have given pesticide companies immunity for any harm caused by their products. Letter writing campaigns by health groups may have led to the delay in taking up the bill. Lobbyists have now moved to the states to insert immunity clauses for their products. Nine states have proposed legislation that would grant immunity to pesticide manufacturers dressed up as changes to product labeling laws. Bayer, the manufacturer of glyphosate, has suggested that the cost of lawsuits may drive them to stop manufacturing it. There are currently no laws being proposed here in Pennsylvania to give immunity to Bayer for glyphosate-related illnesses, but we remain vigilant.

Liability waivers in other products like those given to vaccine manufacturers in 1986 have created perverse incentives to get products to market even if there are safety concerns to make as much profit as possible before the product is pulled from the market.

Any consumer harmed by that product is left with no recourse or compensation for what can be life altering illnesses. If a company wants to market any product in Pennsylvania, consumers should have the right to sue for harms caused by their product. This includes, but is not limited to, manufacturers of vaccines, biologics, small molecule medications, gene therapies, and corporations that produce agricultural tools like pesticides.

Herbal remedies are caught in the Catch-22 of not being allowed to be advertised as treatments because of a lack of scientific research, but such research will not be funded because the treatments cannot be patented. This leaves patients spending more money for pharmaceutical treatments that have more side effects, require a prescription, and may be less effective.

For centuries, medicine relied on case studies and empirical data to show the effectiveness of a treatment. While one or two individual patient outcomes is anecdotal, the results of thousands of treatments is not. The gold standard of a placebo controlled double blind study has its own flaws. For example, many such studies do not enroll participants with comorbidities that represent real-world patients and some do not even enroll patients with the condition the medication was designed to treat! Studies have notoriously excluded black participants and women and many medications are pulled from the market within 5 years because of side effects in patients that were not seen in the trials.

Clinical trials are not the only way to determine a treatments effectiveness and safety. Case studies of thousands of patients in the real world can provide evidence of effectiveness and potential risks. Herbal remedies are molecules that cannot be patented and therefore any funding to perform gold standard trials would have to come from the tax payers. Why spend the money for trials when the data is already available?

Prohibiting practitioners from discussing herbal remedies as a treatment prejudices patients into viewing them as untested, unproven, and ineffective even when data shows the opposite.

Requiring cost prohibitive gold standard clinical trials creates a monopoly on remedies that only large companies can afford and enables pharmaceutical companies to buy control of the health market.

Consolidation of our hospital systems from mergers and acquisitions are leading to higher patient costs, poorer quality of care, and closures of PA hospitals.

Private equity groups are guilty of buying companies, including hospitals, selling real estate owned by the company to partners and leasing it back for incredible rates, a process called sale-leaseback.

House Bill 1460 would give the State Attorney General’s office the ability to prevent mergers and acquisitions of hospitals by Private Equity and Nonprofit firms but is not likely to pass the State Senate. The Senate has a similar bill (SB322) that only covers mergers by private equity firms. Either bill would give the State Attorney General the ability to block mergers and acquisitions that decrease competition, are financially unsound, or are not in the public interest. Both bills include language allowing the State Attorney General to call a public hearing to hear from communities that will be affected by the merger.

We support the passage of either bill as first step to address the growing problem of monopoly and vertical integration in our health systems. We would like to see the language changed to require public hearings and increase transparency.

Governor Shapiro has expressed a desire to pass a bill keeping private equity out of our hospital systems, we need to fight to get legislation to his desk.

Stop pharmaceutical advertisements. Cigarette companies are not permitted to advertise their products, pharmaceutical companies should not be either. Medical decisions require careful thought and understanding. They are not impulse buys and should not be advertised as something an uninformed patient should ask their doctor about.

Ad revenue by pharmaceutical companies is a form of bribery to influence news agencies and editors as they make selections about what types of stories to cover.

SNAP is a program to provide food and nutrition to families who need support. As part of the set of MAHA initiatives, President Trump signed an executive order allowing states to apply for a waiver to the SNAP program that would allow the state to prevent food assistance funds from being spent on sugary beverages and candy that contribute to health issues for low-income recipients.

Nebraska, Iowa, and Indiana have already passed legislation to take advantage of the waiver. Pennsylvania should follow suit.Sugary drinks like soda are not healthy nutritious food. Our state needs to apply for the SNAP waivers being offered by the federal government to remove soda and junk food from SNAP eligible products

Pennsylvania passed a law in 1967, The Cloud Seeding Lisencing Law after attempts in Fulton and Franklin county to reduce hail by seeding clouds with toxic silver iodide came to light. The law created a Weather Modification Board in the Department of Agriculture to oversea and regulate any weather modification activities.

In response to a 2021 Right-to-Know lawsuit, the Department of Agriculture asserted that the board had never given a lisence to any business for cloud seeding and had not been active in years. It has made no attempts to regulate any entity that may or may not be engaged in weather modification in the state.

The federal Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 appropriated funding for solar radiation modification (SRM) research for federal agencies, government contractors, and academic institutions. This research and future initiatives could be carried out over Pennsylvania.

We support Senate Bill 508 which seeks to strengthen transparency and accountability about geoengineering projects that spray chemicals into the skies over the Commonwealth. The Clean Air Preservation Act will “prohibit the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals, chemical compounds, or substances within the borders of Pennsylvania into the atmosphere for purposes which include affecting temperature, weather, and intensity of sunlight.”   

Citizens deserve to know that when they go outside they are not being exposed to chemicals in the air. Organic farmers work hard to avoid use of chemical sprays on their crops.

There are many ways to reduce carbon dioxide by planting trees and cover crops, and improving the health and carbon capture of our soils through sustainable farming.

We do not need to expose citizens to dangerous chemicals and the risk of unforeseen weather events by secretly spraying our skies with pollutants.

Licensure and health regulations classify alternative medical practices like functional medicine, herbal treatments, and holistic practices differently from traditional medicine. The bias against alternative medicine prohibits practitioners from discussing therapies as treatments or advertising benefits.

Patients should be informed about alternatives to pharmaceutical intervention, including the potential risks and benefits of all options. A patient cannot make a truly informed decision if only one medical practice is recognized as legitimate and the other is forced to use biased language when discussing results.

Evironmental contamination of our water supply impacts the health of everyone. Pennsylvanians have the right to know what is coming out of their tap.

Forever chemicals like PFOAs are being found in the bloodstream of every person on the planet. We are exposed to these chemicals in our cookware, food packaging, carpets, upholstery, fire fighting foams and more.

Manufacturers of these chemicals have dumped them into rivers and released them into the air. We now have a catastrophe of water pollution including forever chemicals and microplastics that threatens the health of everyone, yet residents are not informed about levels of these chemicals in their drinking water. We need regulations that require water companies and municipalities to test for contamination of water supplied to customers from these utilities and send every customer an annual report detailing what they are being exposed to.

Public parks and municipal properties pay for landscaping and pest control with our tax dollars. We have a right to know what we are paying for and what our children and pets who play in these parks are being exposed to.

Municipalities should be required to post on their websites the schedule for any chemical spraying of public property as well as the list of chemicals being sprayed. Citizens have the right to know what environmental exposures are present in a public area so they can make an informed decision about whether or not to visit an area.

A growing number of states are banning meat grown from tumor or immortalized cells in laboratories. These new meat products are entering grocery stores without labeling that informs customers of what they are buying or how it is produced.

Livestock is an integral part of sustainable farming. Animals provide nutrients to soil and help with the breakdown of plant matter by trampling plants into the soil. Ethically raising animals for natural protein sources is also integral to the freedom of Americans. Replacing animal protein with lab grown meats brings potential control of the food supply into a small number of powerful hands. We need to support farmers, not corporations in our food supply. Lab grown meat is not a product fit for our grocery store shelves. We should follow the lead of our sister states and ban this product from our grocery stores.

Fluoride is dumped into our water supply without the consent of the consumers who will ingest it. While fluoride treatments have shown effectiveness in strengthening teeth when applied topically and spit out, studies of effects from ingesting fluoride in drinking water has not shown the same benefits. Recent studies link fluoride to lower IQ in young people.

Removal of ingestible fluoride prescription medications from the market has opened the door for states to end the process of fluoridating their water supplies. Florida and Utah have banned fluoridation of drinking water. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Louisiana, South Carolina all have bills under consideration to ban it.

Here in Pennsylvania, adding fluoride to the public water supply is not mandated; however, any public system that already adds fluoride is banned from removing it! This ban is not codified in our laws, but rather is a mandate from the departments. Communities like Lebanon have attempted to discontinue fluoridation programs, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that once started the state agencies have a right to ban communities from stopping them.

 In 2020, the CDC released its Healthy People 2020 plan with HHS and CDC objectives and goals that included a desire to see 79.6% of the US population receiving fluoride in their tap water. Pennsylvania department of health put out a community water fluoridation plan in response that planned to spend our tax dollars educating communities in an attempt to get local governments to adopt fluoridation programs.  This is despite an acknowledgement in the plan that the department was aware of studies linking fluoride to “adverse health/cognitive outcomes.” The department dismisses these studies, merely listing them as obstacles in their goal to increase the number of PA residents receiving fluoride in their drinking water.

The new stance taken by Secretary Kennedy has brought concerns about fluoride to forefront of health discussions. Pennsylvania House Representative Jason Ortitay, just proposed a bill to ban fluoride in public water systems that will finally allow communities to remove the chemical from their drinking water.

We support Ortitay’s proposal and would like to see more representatives cosponsor his bill. If individuals would like to drink fluoridated water, it should be there choice to do so. They should not be forced to use fluoridated water in their homes.

We support SB 601 Allowing Ivermectin for Over-The-Counter Use. Ivermectin is a Noble Prize winning drug with fewer side effects than other over-the-counter medications. However, we feel this bill does not go far enough. There are other drugs with similarly safe profiles after years of use that could also be sold over-the-counter, such as hydroxychloroquine, fenbendazole, and common antibiotics. Hydroxychloroquine is available over-the-counter in many nations. Fenbendazole and many common antibiotics are available for purchase without prescription for animal use and should be equally available in forms meant for human consumption.

Rather than requiring a patient to either wait what could be more than a week for an appointment with a primary care physician or pay for an urgent care or emergency room visit for a routine medical issue, common treatments with safe profiles could made available without a prescription.

Patients should not be infantilized when it comes to their own medical care. Safe medications like antibiotics could be sold behind the counter with identification as certain cold medications are to prevent overuse and reduce the risk of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. We already sell antimicrobial soaps that contribute to this risk, why should patients with a minor infection risk waiting for the infection to grow because of restrictions on access to safe and effective treatments.

The recent trials of Amos Miller show us how government regulation can be corrupted. Miller was forced to choose between applying for a license to sell unpasteurized milk which would prohibit him from selling other unpasteurized products like yogurt and cheese or to sell all of his unpasteurized products to out-of-state customers through a private buyers club.

Despite not selling any products to Pennsylvania customers, the state chose to shut down his farm and prosecute him for selling unpasteurized milk without a license, which he did not do in Pennsylvania.

At trial, the state officials argued that Miller should just apply for the license and receive permission to sell his natural products. His attorney correctly pointed out that the license would restrict not permit him to do business. It would prohibit him from selling some natural products in exchange for permission to sell milk. After an expensive and protracted court battle, Miller won his case.

The state claimed the authority to regulate products sold in other states if they passed through Pennsylvania’s borders. This is a power that it does not have, but in winning his case, Mr. Miller was forced to pay a high price that would bankrupt the average farmer.

The Miller case is a pyrrhic victory and a direct attack on farmers across Pennsylvania. It shows the power of the state to destroy your business even if you win your battle in court.

Farmers should be allowed to sell their products to informed customers without overregulation. If the customer is made aware of the manner in which the product was produced and any chemicals or processes used, they should be free to decide whether or not they want to purchase and consume the product without interference from the state.

Bovaer is a feed additive for cattle to reduce the amount of methane in flatulence. Methane makes up about a millionth of the Earth’s atmosphere and livestock contributes less than 14.5% of methane emissions. Bovaer has been shown to reduce the methane produced by cattle by about 30% in dairy cows and 45% in beef cattle.

Use of Bovaer would only reduce methane in the atmosphere by about one billionth.

Despite assurance from the FDA that Bovaer is safe and effective, New Zealand EPA animal studies show that the drug led to cancer and infertility in rats. These animal studies also show that the drug moves throughout the body and about 16% of dosage enters the milk.

While the FDA recognizes Bovaer as an animal drug, it chose to label it instead as a feed additive. The labeling allows approval of its use in livestock without the requirement for animal studies like those performed by their counterpart in New Zealand.

Feeding cattle Bovaer will have such a minimal effect on the amount of methane in the atmosphere that there is no reasonable expectation that it will affect climate change. Yet, the animal studies in New Zealand suggest 16% of dosages given to dairy cows will wind up in our milk with no studies on how this may affect humans. Why would we want to take such a huge risk for no real benefit?

As an “animal feed” there is no requirement to label milk or beef products to inform consumers that this drug might be present in their food. We need legislation requiring food warning labels and banning the use of this product in cows in Pennsylvania.