Transparency: FDA Wants 55 Year Delay to Provide Pfizer Covid Vaccine Data

Yes, that’s not a typo. The Food & Drug Administration, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from scientists and researchers, has asked for 55 years, more than half a century, to publicize the data it relied on to approve Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. Talk about transparency in government, this case is an example of the horrendous nature of bureaucracies that move fast when they want to, and literally slow to crawl and hide behind their own incompetence when they want to withhold information from the public.

Fifty-five years from now, somewhere around the year 2076, is when the government says it can finally finish producing the requested documents. Funny, since the government used the same documents within a 100 day period to approve the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use authorization:

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.

Why the delay? Well, the government says it can only process about 500 pages per day, which, if you do the math, puts us half a century down the road when the general public will have the complete record of all information the FDA has on the Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 vaccine:

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.”

The plaintiffs are arguing that if it only took the FDA approximately 108 days to review the hundreds of thousands of pages itself, then surely it can provide these pages to the public in a more timely manner than 55 years:

Plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that their request should be top priority, and that the FDA should release all the material no later than March 3, 2022.

“This 108-day period is the same amount of time it took the FDA to review the responsive documents for the far more intricate task of licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,” wrote Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad in New York and John Howie of Howie Law in Dallas in court papers.

You would think the FDA, and Biden administration which is currently running it, would acquiesce and want to assuage concerns people have about getting vaccinated. One way to do that is by providing as much transparency and openness as possible with regard to the data that exists on vaccine effectiveness and possible side effects. The 55-year delay is absurd since many people who were vaccinated already or might be vaccinated in the near future will not even be alive by the time the FDA gets around to releasing all the records.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, made the point about how the FDA could review the data so quickly when approving the vaccine for public use, but can’t provide that data to the public in a timely manner:

I submitted this FOIA request to the FDA: they now claim it will take them 55 years to release the data on which Pfizer's vaccine approval was based, though it only took them 108 days to review this data for the approval process. New heights of absurdity. https://t.co/be2kBXAjHj

— Aaron Kheriaty, MD (@akheriaty) November 18, 2021

The plaintiffs are also arguing that the FDA is breaking its own regulations on transparency and availability of data:

They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine.”

Given the intense public interest in the vaccine, the plaintiffs’ lawyers say that the FDA “should have been preparing to release (the data) simultaneously with the licensure. Instead, it has done the opposite.”

Hiding behind government bureaucracy only fuels distrust that the public isn’t being given the full body of knowledge available regarding Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, or the mRNA vaccine from Moderna as well. It seems absurd that FDA lawyers would toss out a timeframe of more than half a century to respond to something that is of immediate and present public interest.

As some have joked on Twitter, perhaps they will use the FDA timeframe in their own personal decision to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

https://twitter.com/USBornNRaised/status/1461528980851511301

With the Biden administration forcibly mandating government employees and contractors to be vaccinated to keep their jobs, shouldn’t the same government work to provide information and data as quickly as possible at the same time? Of course not! Why would they do that?