FDA workers will take 55 years to release the information requested by scientists on the data used to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Even the famously late “Big Dig” tunnel system built under Boston took “only” 16 years. That was 3.5 miles of tunnel under one of America’s biggest cities. But when the state doesn’t want to do something, it can always come up with an excuse not to. Reuters reports on the FOIA request:
Freedom of Information Act requests are rarely speedy, but when a group of scientists asked the federal government to share the data it relied upon in licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the response went beyond typical bureaucratic foot-dragging.
As in 55 years beyond.
That’s how long the Food & Drug Administration in court papers this week proposes it should be given to review and release the trove of vaccine-related documents responsive to the request. If a federal judge in Texas agrees, plaintiffs Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency can expect to see the full record in 2076.
The 1967 FOIA law requires federal agencies to respond to information requests within 20 business days. However, the time it takes to actually get the documents “will vary depending on the complexity of the request and any backlog of requests already pending at the agency,” according to the government’s central FOIA website.
Justice Department lawyers representing the FDA note in court papers that the plaintiffs are seeking a huge amount of vaccine-related material – about 329,000 pages.
The plaintiffs, a group of more than 30 professors and scientists from universities including Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown, filed suit in September in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, seeking expedited access to the records. They say that releasing the information could help reassure vaccine skeptics that the shot is indeed “safe and effective and, thus, increase confidence in the Pfizer vaccine.”
But the FDA can’t simply turn the documents over wholesale. The records must be reviewed to redact “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials,” wrote DOJ lawyers in a joint status report filed Monday.
The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests.
Action Line: Could you ever tell your customer that you’ll get their product to them in 55 years? Obviously not, but governments have very low accountability. The bigger the government, the harder it is to hold people’s feet to the fire. If you can move to a state where the government is small, and employees remember who they work for, you should. Start with my list of Super States.
P.S. Reminds one of this classic joke told by President Ronald Reagan.
