Health Freedom Defense Fund is encouraged by a recent development from Washington, D.C., which shows considerable promise in moving the country toward accountability and appropriate legal liability for dangerous measures imposed on the public under the current regime of emergency public health law in the United States. HFDF supports this targeted legislation as the first step in a comprehensive repeal process at the federal level for the PREP Act.
On July 16, 2025, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced House Resolution 4388, with the aim of eliminating key sections of the Public Health Service Act. The sections in question are Sections 319F-3 and 319F-4, which together form the defensive liability shield for organizations, corporations, and public officers manufacturing, distributing, and administering "countermeasures" during a declared public health emergency under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act. This would not only apply to SARS-CoV-2 "countermeasures" but also to the many other disease areas currently under PREP Act legal immunity1, and of course any number of future emergency declarations.
This bill would eliminate federal immunity for all previously "covered countermeasures," rightfully allowing state tort laws to function as intended to cover negligence and product liability, opening up new avenues for justice and compensation for those injured or killed by these products and interventions. In addition, civil lawsuits for damages, injury, and distress would be avenues for claims against drug manufacturers, hospital systems, or individuals who administered countermeasures during declared public health emergencies. In short, it would remove the broad federal shroud of immunity and impunity, which to this day has disallowed state legal systems from functioning in the interest of justice.
If passed, this resolution would also end the charade of the Covered Countermeasures Process Fund at the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) at HHS, established under 319F-4[a]. This deeply flawed, publicly funded account, funds a mechanism outside of established law to provide some compensation for "countermeasure" injury, at least in principle. However, according to the HRSA at HHS, only 39 of 13,836 applicants claiming injury received any compensation whatsoever.2
The mechanism has a strict one-year statute of limitations to file a complaint for medical bills and death benefits, does not cover pain and suffering, and there is no appeals process available. One can only imagine how many applicants were discouraged from even trying to receive compensation, by the unfair standards, and the extremely low success rate for filings to the CICP.
Unfortunately but inevitably, Representative Massie's HR 4388 itself also has some limitations, despite its encouraging aspects. By limiting injuries to those proceedings, actions, or claims "already underway" or those that are "commenced on or after" the bill is enacted. This constrains those who had limited resources to sue, or rightly perceived the comprehensive liability shield or CICP's dysfunction as a discouragement from initiating suits or claims in the first place. Those people and their families still deserve access to compensation and redress.
This limitation was likely engineered to increase the chances of the resolution passing, by increasing its perceived practicality and ease of implementation. This may be so, but we should continue to strive for justice for all those impacted by the hastily developed, poorly studied products and interventions, and (at least so far) liability-free rollout of those tools, using bullying, coercion, increasing restrictions to personal freedom, and pursuit of a normal life.
This bill represents a key first step in restoring the rights of Americans to sue for injuries endured under emergency law, and in the just dismantling of a CICP mechanism that is dysfunctional by design. Legislators that support personal health freedom and accountability for injury under the law, for government and private actors alike, should support this resolution.
- Under PREP Act, countermeasure immunity currently: botulinum toxin, orthopox viruses, viral hemorrhagic fevers, Zika virus, pandemic flu nerve agents and insecticides, anthrax, and acute radiation syndrome. ↩︎
- https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data ↩︎
