Nearly three months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration licensed the Pfizer COVID injection, the agency has released the first 91 out of tens of thousands of documents it reviewed before approving it for emergency use.
Last week, court documents revealed the FDA was asking the court to schedule a monthly release of the documents over the next 55 years. This means the “full transparency” the FDA promised the American public would not be fulfilled until the year 2076.
The FDA was sued soon after it approved the injection for not providing a single page of documentation relating to that decision beforehand. According to a status report filed Nov. 15, “FDA proposes to work through the list of documents that Plaintiff requested FDA prioritize for production in order of priority at a rate of 500 pages per month,” since this rate is “consistent with processing schedules entered by courts across the country in FOIA cases.”
The plaintiffs, a group of 30 scientists, academics, and professors under the name Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (referred to as PHMPT in the report), filed the lawsuit on August 27. Since the agency did not release a single document since this group’s open records request, made almost three months ago, they asked the court to give the FDA until March 3, 2022 to fulfill the records request.
The agency responsible for approving a brand new pharmaceutical they knew would be immediately mandated for millions of Americans complained that the plaintiffs were requesting they “process and produce” more than 80,000 pages a month, claiming they do not have the personnel to redact sensitive information from the records at that rate.
The PHMPT has argued that since it only took the FDA 108 days to conduct what it claims is a “rigorous” examination of the documents to determine whether Pfizer’s product was safe to approve, it should be able to release documents to the public in a similar timeframe. But the agency claims this argument is “specious,” as its information specialists conduct an “entirely different” kind of review when deciding what information must be kept confidential.
The FDA also cited an unrelated decision by the D.C. Circuit Court, which stated that “another agency’s policy of processing 500 pages per request per month… ‘serves to promote efficient responses to a larger number of requesters,’” and that allowing this plaintiff to similarly “jump to the head of the FOIA processing line would upset the agency’s processes and be detrimental to the other expedited requesters.”
PHMPT is arguing a “compelling need” for expediting processing, as their Freedom of Information Act request “concerns a matter of current exigency …….