A US federal judge has given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only eight months — not the 75 years it requested — to release all documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty Covid vaccine.
On Thursday, Judge Mark Pittman rejected the FDA’s claim that it could release redacted versions of documents at a rate of only 500 pages per month, waiting until 2096 to divulge safety data on the jab. This means that 400 000 pages of documents will have to be made public within eight months.
“The documents in question relate to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA,” reported childrenshealthdefense.org.
The request from the health professionals was initially rejected by the FDA, but PHMPT filed a lawsuit against it to obtain the safety data. It raises the question of why a pharmaceutical company would so desperately want to hide its safety data from the public.
In order to avoid making their safety data available, the FDA had claimed that its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research which deals with the records only has 10 staff members, two of whom are “new”. In fact, the FDA, as of 2020, had 18 062 employees, which is quite enough manpower to speedily fulfill the FOIA request.
The PHMPT has pledged to publish all the FDA documents related to the safety of vaccines on its website.