Sharon Lerner

Reporter

Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment. She joined ProPublica in 2022 after seven years as an investigative reporter at The Intercept, where she focused on failures of the environmental regulatory process as well as biosafety and pandemic profiteering.

Lerner has reported extensively on PFAS — a family of chemicals linked to cancer, infertility, developmental harm and immune dysfunction — detailing how manufacturers of the chemicals covered up the danger for decades. She also broke the news that firefighting foam used by the military contained PFAS and that GenX, a PFAS compound that DuPont created to replace the cancer-causing compound PFOA, also causes cancer. With colleagues at The Intercept, Lerner obtained grant materials that revealed that the U.S. had funded risky virus research in Wuhan, China.

Lerner’s work has been honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists ten times, and by the Newswomen’s Club of New York, which named her its journalist of the year in 2021.

The Company Testing Air in East Palestine Homes Was Hired by Norfolk Southern. Experts Say That Testing Isn’t Enough.

“It’s almost like if you want to find nothing, you run in and run out,” says one expert.

This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk

Almost half of products cleared so far under the new federal biofuels program are not in fact biofuels — and the EPA acknowledges that the plastic-based ones may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment.

As Workers Battle Cancer, The Government Admits Its Limit for a Deadly Chemical Is Too High

The U.S. agency that is supposed to safeguard worker health has all but given up on setting limits to protect them from dangerous chemicals. Meanwhile, workers are dying.

Why the U.S. Is Losing the Fight to Ban Toxic Chemicals

From a powerful chemical industry that helped write the toxic substances law to an underfunded EPA lacking in resolve, the flaws in the American chemical regulatory apparatus run deep.

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