First, the time frame was set to take about 55 years for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release all the data it examined when deciding to approve Pfizer’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use over a year ago.
Upon further negotiations, the FDA drastically increased the requested timeframe to 75 years, leaving the agency until the year 2097 to fully provide all the vaccine data it had used to approve the vaccine in just 108 short days back in 2020.
Now, a judge has ordered the FDA to move up the timeline significantly, denying the agency’s ridiculous request to take 75 years, and instead forcing the health bureaucracy to comply within 8 months, meaning all data should be released by September of this year:
The timeline ordered Thursday by U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman radically shortens the timeline under which the FDA has to produce troves of documents. The order stems from a Freedom of Information Act document lawsuit by a coalition of doctors and scientists with the nonprofit Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The group seeks an estimated 450,000 pages of material about the vaccine-creation process during the COVID-19 pandemic, which came into full force in the United States in March 2020.
Rather than producing 500 pages a month, the FDA’s proposed timeline, Pittman ordered the agency to turn over 55,000 a month. That means all the Pfizer vaccine data should be public by the end of September rather than the year 2097, the deadline that the FDA wanted.
While the court acknowledged, of course, the burden created by FOIA requests on government agencies, it also acknowledged the interest in matters which are of immediate concern to the general public:
“Here, the court recognizes the ‘unduly burdensome’ challenges that this [Freedom of Information Act] request may present to the FDA,” the court ruling noted. “But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a ‘more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration … than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not rush[ed] on behalf of the United States.”
Giving the FDA 55 years or 75 years means that many or most people receiving Pfizer’s vaccine today will be deceased before all the data is released. That might not mean much to some, but it does mean a lot to researchers and doctors who would like to examine the data, which is public property, to understand what considerations were involved with the FDA’s original decision to approve the vaccine for emergency use.
One of the originators of the FOIA request, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, took note days ago of the judge’s ruling on Twitter:
Judge did the right thing on our FOIA request to the FDA: in 8 months we'll be able to see all the data on which the Pfizer vaccine approval was based. Stay tuned.https://t.co/BSXDwL8rXg
— Aaron Kheriaty, MD (@akheriaty) January 7, 2022
The ruling also forces the FDA to provide a large data dump by the end of January, which should provide some 12,000 pages of documentation.
The remaining data must be provided at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, with the first batch due by March 1, 2022.
It’s not entirely certain what there is to be learned from the data, but doctors and interested parties would like to see what types of side effects or adverse reactions were known about the vaccines before their release to the public.
With Covid-19 ongoing, and the Biden administration continuing to push booster shots, it’s in the public’s best interest to have as much data available as possible when deciding on the seriousness of a medical procedure.
