The agency said in a court filing Monday that in order to complete a Freedom of Information Act request for data and information on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it will need to process 329,000 pages of documents and can only do so at a rate of 500 pages per month. At that rate, the information requested will not be fully released until the year 2076.
The FOIA request was submitted to the FDA in August by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of more than 30 international public health professionals, medical professionals, scientists, and journalists that “exist solely to obtain and disseminate the data relied upon by the FDA to license COVID-19 vaccines.” The group includes academics and medical experts from Yale, Harvard Medical School, and UCLA; alumni from the Trump administration; and prominent health experts from around the world.
PHMPT is being represented by Siri & Glimstad, a New York-based law firm that has performed millions of dollars of legal work on behalf of groups opposed to vaccine mandates.