Judge Gives FDA Eight Months Instead of 55 Years to Release Pfizer Vaccine Data
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman: “The court ‘concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance.'”
Last November, I reported that in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) asked a federal court to grant the agency until 2076, 55 years, to process and release all the data on the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
The judge has given them eight months instead.
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make public the data it relied on to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, imposing a dramatically accelerated schedule that should result in the release of all information within about eight months.
That’s roughly 75 years and four months faster than the FDA said it could take to complete a Freedom of Information Act request by a group of doctors and scientists seeking an estimated 450,000 pages of material about the vaccine.
The court “concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump in 2019.
The rate of the documentation release will be substantially faster than the 500 pages per month initially requested by the FDA.
Pittman’s ruling requires the FDA to start producing documents at an expedited pace — more than 12,000 pages before Jan. 31. That timeline is also in line with the agency’s proposal. But deviating sharply from the FDA’s desired timeline, the judge ordered the agency to “produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.”
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency said the data should be made public quickly because the FDA took just under four months to review the data before granting full approval for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
“Pfizer began its rolling submission on May 7, 2021, and the vaccine was licensed on August 23, 2021, a total of 108 days from initial submission to licensure,” it wrote in a December filing.
Pittman cited a quote from the late Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, that excessive secrecy from a government agency “feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in the government.”
It may be a bit too late to prevent the reduction in the public’s confidence in government, however. Per Newsweek:
Less than a third of Republicans say they trust the U.S. government, a dramatic double-digit decline compared with a year ago, new polling shows.
…The survey results, published Thursday, show that while 48 percent of Republicans said they had “some” trust in the U.S. government in January 2021, that number has now plummeted to just 28 percent. That marks a decline of 20 points over the past year.
Meanwhile, trust in federal elections among Republicans has dipped as well. A year ago, 43 percent of GOP voters had “some” trust in the U.S. electoral system. Now, that amount has dipped by 8 percentage points to just 35 percent—or slightly more than a third.
Newsweek blames President Donald Trump. Yet any explanation that does not take into account the numerous flip-flops and confusing recommendations from government “experts” related to coronavirus response is missing a critical element in its assessment.
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Comments
Somebody was trying to pull a fast one. Whoever it was at the FDA who made the decision to ask for 55 years should be given 55 minutes to clean out their desk.
And have their pension revoked. And perhaps have their face beaten to a pulp, for good measure.
No, he (and Fauci) should be given 55 years… by a different federal judge.
If the FDA follows typical government behavior they will produce absolutely nothing at the end of January. When called to explain it in court, they’ll claim they are in the process of determining how much staff needs to be hired to accommodate the “request.” They will also ask for several tens of millions of dollars to expedite the process.
Two years from now, they will have produced next to nothing, and what they do produce will be heavily redacted for no apparent reason. When the judge demands an explanation, they’ll require he sign an NDA first.
There will be no consequences for any of these shenanigans until sometime shortly after Donald Trump is sworn in again. They will then sue him for the hideous crime of requiring them to do their jobs.
This. Exactly this. At the end of eight months, absolutely nothing will have been done. And as a result, no one will be punished, no one will be held in contempt of court. The judge can pound his gavel all he wants, but the Deep State bureaucracy will ignore him.
That means the shall we say gaslighting Pfizer has conducted will be exposed. (They rigged the original data).
They will just find a new , more amiable judge
Get those shredders and furnaces running. That’s a lot of evidence to destroy in just 8 months.
Eight months? An orchestrated Antifa strike could destroy it in eight hours. And they could wear MAGA hats while they do it, two birds.
As at AoSHq will ask Can a Hawaiian Judge come and save Pfizer and maybe give them a even hundred ?
Although it is hard to believe, a typical filing with the FDA for a drug approval can be 400,000 pages long. If one for the Covid vaccine is similar, this task might not be much more than finding their submission plus related correspondence. It might be a rather trivial job, that because of the enormity of the basic submission allows them to pretend if would take decades.
The task is not finding the submission, it’s reviewing it to remove trade secrets that the FDA is duty-bound to protect.
Still way too long.