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Wait, What?
I know we are all really getting tired of the whole COVID thing, but little items like these keep popping up. From “Meaning in History,” today I learn that the Food and Drug Administration has asked a federal judge to grant it until the year 2076 to fully release Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine data. That’s right sports fans, the FDA wants 55 years to fully release the vaccine data. How did the FDA come up with this number, you ask? Well, according to the Freedom of Information Act request, Page 3, “FDA has assessed that there are more than 329,000 pages potentially responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request. (This page count is under-inclusive of the material responsive to the request, as it does not include certain types of records that cannot be meaningfully paginated, such as data captured in spreadsheets that contain thousands of rows of data.)” The problem is with the scheduling of the release of this information, as outlined on Page 4 of said FOIA request. What the FDA wants is “to process and produce the non-exempt portions of responsive records at a rate of 500 pages per month.” Let’s stop here for a moment and do some simple math. The FDA has 329,000 pages of data to process. It wants to process these pages at a rate of 500 pages a month. So, 329,000 pages divided by 500 pages released per month equals 658 months to process all the documents. And 658 months divided by 12 months in one year equals 54.83 years.
The plaintiff in this FOIA (Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency) has requested this data to be provided to it within a four-month period, but the FDA says, “Plaintiff’s request (as set forth below) that FDA process and produce the non-exempt portions of more than 329,000 pages in four months would force FDA to process more than 80,000 pages per month. Undersigned counsel is not aware of any court ever granting such a request. The Court should decline to enter Plaintiff’s schedule for numerous reasons.” The “reasons” are covered in Pages 4-14 of the FOIA request. Bottom line: We know we are going to have to tell you plebs something, and we are going to do it in our own good time (insert middle finger here).
Published in General
The freedom of information act should be changed such that everything must be turned over. There should be no delays allowed for processing of information either you know what’s in your information or you don’t. If you don’t know what’s in your information I guess it’s going to get crowdsourced.
I find it impossible to believe that any freedom of information act request is actually touching up against real data that’s a real threat to the country if it gets out.
Further I think the rules should be if you claim National security and then the documents were released and there was no National security you should be put in prison for lying to the American people and trying to keep information secret that didn’t need to be kept secret.
Oh and if you’re dead there should be a massive financial penalty that’s levied against your descendants. All these people making this decisions are always multi-millionaires making all sorts of money off of lobbying and other cozy government personnel relationships. Let’s go get the money back.
I’m growing increasingly vengeful in my Outlook. The punishments are not high enough there’s not enough damage done to people that betray the Republic. The idea of getting caught betraying the Republic should be so scary and so awful that nobody is willing to do it.
I’d be fine with the FDA waiting 55 years to release Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine data if all Americans had been allowed 55 years to decide whether or not to comply with the vaccine mandate.
Yeah, there’s a problem there. That’s a lot of pages.
FOIA requests are necessarily made when you don’t already have the information you want to know. As such they have a tendency to include an overbroad list of search terms in order to be sure to get the one document that’s actually relevant. I guarantee you this request had a line like “…any email, note, memo, or other internal communication that included the words COVID, pandemic, Corona Virus, Ivermectin, …” you get the idea. We don’t know precisely what the smoking gun is so we’re going to make them produce everything until we find it. And a big bureaucracy like the FDA generates a lot of pointless paperwork.
I’m open to the option of “they turn over everything, now”, but recognize that this is destructive; that doing so means there’s no secrecy in anything in the FDA anymore. Your company has a trade secret that you had to share with the FDA to get your cheez ballz labelled? Hope nobody mentioned COVID in any of the emails back and forth because if they did the the whole world is going to know how you get your Wild Cheez Flavaz ™. You dump all the documents without review you seriously damage the FDA’s ability to do their actual mission from here on out.
Again, I’m open to that. I don’t trust the FDA, I don’t trust they’re being honest with the public, and I didn’t much like the organization before the ‘rona either. I could live with the whole bureaucracy being gelded. Wanting to take the slow road and only publish what they can review in a reasonable time frame doesn’t mean they’re hiding things, but I’m feeling awful short on trust these days.
Even so, 329,000 pages is a lot to review. Before we “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” it’s worth reflecting on what those torpedoes are and what damage they may do.
In other words, “We can’t do it because it’s too hard” . . .
I say “tough”
I don’t see any reason for the FDA to keep anything secret ever.
I have none
This data must be computerized. The rate of 500 pages/month, it sounds like they have a scribe and quill pen doing the copying.
Huh? Reflect on what damage they may do? The only thing that should be exempt from disclosure is non-toxic or non-reactive proprietary ingredients. What we’re concerned with is damage to our physical selves, not our sensibilities.
Okay, now tell me which of those 329,000 pages describe things which ought to be exempt from the FOIA request.
So the world is participating in one giant collective medical experiment, and not all willingly……
I don’t care. If there is damage, tough. Big pharma can foot the bill. Screw them.
Two scribes.
Right; that’s fine. “Burn the FDA down” is within the range of outcomes I’d find acceptable. The point isn’t that we can’t damage the FDA, it’s that we ought to understand that that’s implicit in what we’re demanding.
If massive document releases from any agency results in its being burnt down, then it has it coming. They should have nothing to hide.
Unlike most people here at Ricochet, I ran a $30million a year public agency. Everything other than client’s records were subject to FOIA. We had no troubles compiling quickly with any query. You know why? We were not corrupt.
It didn’t take 50 years to write and collate them, though. I took, what, a year?
Other than saline, how do we know they are non-reactive and non-toxic? The protein spike are said to be benign my the manufacturer, but a toxin by others. I say, list them all.
I’m thinking it’s time to abandon reading Deuteronomy and just focus in on Psalms. Oh Lord, how long will you allow my enemies to get away with murder? How long will they prosper? Have mercy on me, oh Lord, remember me in your kindness.
Which is fair. I looked up the FDA FTE’s (uh, full time equivalents) which, if you assume one intern can review 500 papers a month, it’d take less than 1% of their staff in order to review 80,000 pages a month like the lawsuit requests. You know what? That’s doable. Screw ’em if they can’t manage that rate.
Not the vaccine; things tangentially related. It’s theoretically possible that someone’s secret ingredient (partially hydrogenated love) is included in an email that randomly mentions COVID. If that gets released willy-nilly that causes them harm without helping us at all.
I’m with Bryan on this, if something in those pages is “damaging,” then it’s a self-inflicted wound. I understand the need for proprietary discretion to protect a product, but this is about the FDA’s deliberations. Shouldn’t those be a matter of public record?
Just caught up with you here. There must be a process/guidelines or else the 500 pages wouldn’t be on offer. If there is a process it can be replicated and contractors used. It seems to me the FDA’s decision process is a matter of public interest, and because of the current circumstances related to these particular decisions, the public interest is not served by a 55-year disclosure.
Besides, if someone signed their government agency e-mail with a kissy-lips emoji, isn’t that on them?
If there is any legitimate issue here, it is with the probably patented and other proprietary information of Pfizer’s that necessarily was part of their submission. If I were the judge, I’d order Pfizer to devote some small fraction of the bazillions of dollars the feds are paying them, to hire a team of folks to go through these pages toute suite, and cull out the privileged parts. Give them maybe 90 days. Otherwise, it all comes out. Betcha they’d comply and the public interest would be served.
329,000 pages of information sounds like a smoke screen. There is probably much duplication of boilerplate, or this is just an outright lie.
I would be OK with that. It would also be OK with Pfizer losing proprietary information because screw them.
No big corporation no government agency no institution may any longer receive the benefit of the doubt. Every single one is a corrupt enterprise that does not have my best interests at heart and in fact is hostile to them until proven otherwise. They get burned I will enjoy the heat of the fire.
Surely all this information is in a digital format . . . just release the files!
On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the FDA’s position that properly curating the appropriate information and redacting confidential, privileged, and personal identifying information is not a minor task. Doing that exact work used to be my job, and it’s not as easy as handing over an external hard drive.
On the other hand, corporations involved in lawsuits do this all the time — that’s why it was my job. You hire a document review company, pay a team of 50 lawyers $25/hr with no benefits to review 50 documents an hour, and you’ve got all 329,000 documents through their first pass review in three weeks. Add another week or two for redactions of documents that need it and quality control checks, and you’ve got the information ready to disclose by the end of the year. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s what every other large party in a lawsuit has to accept.
Exactly. When I was between jobs, I took a temp job as a contract lawyer at $27/hr to review thousands of pages of documents in the run-up to a multi-billion dollar merger — this was part of the due diligence as the target owned thousands of leases on properties all over the nation, and we were looking for documents related to those, flagging them so a different team could study them for disclosure. There were about 20 of us on the scanning team, and at 8 hours a day, we were done in less than three weeks.
Military and diplomatic data and SOME police data needs to be classified. ALL research data paid for by our tax dollars should be public automatically. Including health and science (looking at you, global warming data).
Funny that it did not take 50 years to amass those docs.
The usual ways to deflect FOI requests are (a) assessing an exorbitant charge: depending on the agency and governing regs, a requestor can sometimes be put off by saying they have to pay for all the copies etc. ; (b) pettifoggery about the request being unclear, overbroad, involving classified, privileged content, harrumph, harrumph etc and let the clock run as the requestor tried to get on the docket in federal court; (c) just do nothing for as long as possible then say it was really, really hard when called out on it by some judge.
The non-genius who responded that it would take 55 years is a disgrace to professional, general-public-despising bureaucrats everywhere who have worked hard to create barriers to state and federal FOIA laws for years. Showing contempt for those seeking accountability and transparency is an art form and this clown let down the side by being overtly stupid.
The usual timeframe for defiance of FOIA is whatever delay is needed to not embarrass the incumbent Administration and its appointees or not embarrass senior career staff until they can be promoted to new roles or retire. Statute of limitations issues for unwanted potential litigation can be a factor. Also, one does not want to respond too quickly or the rubes will expect that promptness in all other requests.
There is no reason that all of this information (properly filtered for HIPAA reasons) could not be in an online archive in a short time.
Still like burning them and making them hurt, more. I am happy to damage the FDA and any drugs companies, frankly. They have it coming after 2020.
When called out, people should go to prison. Basically, take your shot, but if the judge disagrees, you are in contempt and get a year.