Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Food and Drug Administration regarding data on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine last August. The FDA agreed to complete the request, but eyebrows were raised after the agency asked the federal court to allow for a full 55 years to complete the request.
The agency claims that the document will have to be processed from 329,000 pages of documentation that can only be afforded a rate of 500 pages of data per month. At that rate, the process will take 55 years to complete and the FOIA will be fulfilled in the year 2076.
The PHMPT, is a group representing over 30 international public health officials from scientific, journalistic, and medical backgrounds and are seeking to “obtain and disseminate… data [used by] the FDA to license COVID-19 vaccines.” The group is comprised of medical experts and academics from Harvard Medical School, UCLA, Yale, and alumni of the Trump administration.
PHMPT’s representatives are Siri and Glimstad, a law firm based out of New York which has completed millions of dollars in legal work pro bono for groups opposed to vaccine mandates.
The group requested complete information regarding the Pfizer vaccine, including data pertaining to its effectiveness and safety, adverse reaction reports, consumer complaints, product experience reports, lists of active and inactive ingredients, correspondence related to the vaccine, analytical methodology, all records for particular lots of Pfizer, and all records demonstrating testing for particular lots by the FDA.
The group also requested expedited processing for their FOIA submission given the “compelling need” of the FDA to speedily release the data. The PHMPT argues that the FDA’s lack of transparency regarding COVID-19 vaccines “erodes the confidence” of both the public and the scientific and medical communities.
The group highlighted the “urgent and immediate need” to access the data given that currently people are being expelled from school, the military, transportation and employment over vaccine mandates. The need to examine the “safety and efficacy” of the vaccine is of key importance regarding such policies, as the group argues.
The group scoffed at the FDA’s request for over 20,000 days to process a FOIA when they completed the licensure for the Pfizer vaccine after just 108 days.
Author: Linda Miller
