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How we can work together to address the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented challenge for our country, threatening our health, wellbeing and democracy. Now more than ever, we need to work together to ensure that our government has a coordinated, strategic response to safeguard the public’s health, protect consumers from emerging dangers and ensure people can still participate fully in our democracy.
U.S. PIRG has assembled a COVID-19 response team of policy experts, state advocates, organizers and researchers. And we are coordinating the efforts of the PIRGs around the country through our national lobbying office (U.S. PIRG). If we all pull together, we can find concrete ways to protect public health, consumers and our democracy. Here’s how you help:


If we ever want to get this virus under control, and get some semblance of our lives back, we have to start doing things differently, and our leaders need to help us make the collective sacrifices it will take to save the lives of our family, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens.

We need to come together in a bold and immediate way to get more tests to the people that need them.

If a trained hospital technician can repair a lifesaving piece of medical equipment, such as a ventilator, they should be allowed to do so -- especially during a global pandemic. But manufacturers often restrict access to service information for the devices they make, making it unnecessarily difficult for hospitals to maintain their own equipment. We're working to pass a Medical Right to Repair bill to end hospital repair restrictions.

Some businesses are still significantly inflating prices for critical supplies. We need stronger action from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prevent sellers from taking advantage of consumers.

At any given time, about 1.3 million people with long-term medical issues or short-term rehabilitation needs are residing in the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes. And too many of them are at risk due to dangerous shortages of personal protective equipment and staff, according to ongoing research by U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group, which has been analyzing government data.

How do you avoid phishing and other online scams? Can you get a refund for travel expenses? How do you protect your credit? We’ve assembled a set of consumer tips and guides, and will add more in the days to come.














