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> Absent Congress appropriating funds specifically for it, yes. I disagree with that. FDA was able to produce and analyze the documents in roughly a years time

> Absent Congress appropriating funds specifically for it, yes. I disagree with that. FDA was able to produce and analyze the documents in roughly a years time. They scrutinized the data enough that they felt comfortable in approving a novel vaccine. Surely releasing a USB stick with the documents on it shouldn't take 50x the time to analyze and produce the documents in the first place. > Citizenship, not taxpaying, is relevant for public dat Distinction without a difference in this case. > citizens (through their representatives) didn't choose to pay for the segregation of public and nonpublic information for release on a schedule more expedited than general FOIA releases. This is circular reasoning. When owning slaves was legal I could have said "citizens did not pay for law enforcement to catch slave owners". But that wouldn't be the end of the discussion. If a rule or law is wrong, we must fix it, not accept it as the eternal truth. > Maybe, though for processes that can involve It is hardly relevant what is involved. People paid for the research, subjected themselves to a vaccine you said is ok. They deserve to know the reasoning behind the conclusions.

smaudet 5y ago
> Surely releasing a USB stick with the documents on it shouldn't take 50x the time to analyze and produce the documents in the first place. Absolutely disagree. If I have the following: "Joe blogs who is 89 and lives at 1400 West Rd, Los Angeles, CA 10921, today went to go obtain a vaccine and got the sniffles. His wife had eaten pizza, says Pfizer, and so precipitated a reaction via airborne cheese reactivity', it probably took you all of two seconds to read that. If you have to redact any of that, you first must confirm what to redact, whether talking about Joe's wife somehow constitutes a breach of personal information, etc. Maybe the address information is fine to leave in, maybe its not. But now instead of just regurgitating a couple sentences, you have to sit and deconstruct the sentence, match it to various classifications, etc., all by hand. Does that make FOIA requests somewhat useless? Perhaps, but we never mandated that the information going in had to be foia compliant. If you want it faster, sue for the public disclosure of all vaccine materials regardless of classification, and contact your senator, not your foia office. IMO the various vaccines should be public property anyways, not the property of any one corp, especially given we all are paying the price...
tzs 5y ago
> I disagree with that. FDA was able to produce and analyze the documents in roughly a years time. They scrutinized the data enough that they felt comfortable in approving a novel vaccine. Surely releasing a USB stick with the documents on it shouldn't take 50x the time to analyze and produce the documents in the first place. Producing documents in response to a FOIA request isn't just a matter of simply copying them. If the documents contain anything that is not legal to release to the general public (such as personal information of patients) that has to be redacted first.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  Sure, and that should not take 50 years for a document that took a year to create and analyse well enough to authorise the vaccine based on the findings.
  - Uberphallus 5y ago
    Reviewing/analysing data and filtering it are dramatically different tasks. With raw data, most of the heavy lifting is done by your data analysis stack, you don't crunch numbers yourself. Complying with FOIA requests though, is largely manual work. The FDA has 14,000 employees; its FOIA office has 10, and they go at roughly 80,000 pages per month, meaning each employee does 8,000 pages per month, or roughly 400 per working day per employee, less than a minute per page. That to my non expert opinion sounds pretty fast. That speed has been appropriate until now that the plaintiffs want 4 months' worth of FDA FOIA work for yesterday. I agree that there should be a solution for these cases, but it's this particular FOIA request that's the anomaly, not the FDA way of work.
    - perryizgr8 5y ago
      If the FDA is not able to deliver our documents to us in time, maybe it is time to shut it down. Let public do the research and let consumers decide if they want to take the vaccine based on available results.
      - 5y ago

smaudet 5y ago

> Surely releasing a USB stick with the documents on it shouldn't take 50x the time to analyze and produce the documents in the first place. Absolutely disagree. If I have the following: "Joe blogs who is 89 and lives at 1400 West Rd, Los Angeles, CA 10921, today went to go obtain a vaccine and got the sniffles. His wife had eaten pizza, says Pfizer, and so precipitated a reaction via airborne cheese reactivity', it probably took you all of two seconds to read that. If you have to redact any of that, you first must confirm what to redact, whether talking about Joe's wife somehow constitutes a breach of personal information, etc. Maybe the address information is fine to leave in, maybe its not. But now instead of just regurgitating a couple sentences, you have to sit and deconstruct the sentence, match it to various classifications, etc., all by hand. Does that make FOIA requests somewhat useless? Perhaps, but we never mandated that the information going in had to be foia compliant. If you want it faster, sue for the public disclosure of all vaccine materials regardless of classification, and contact your senator, not your foia office. IMO the various vaccines should be public property anyways, not the property of any one corp, especially given we all are paying the price...

tzs 5y ago

> I disagree with that. FDA was able to produce and analyze the documents in roughly a years time. They scrutinized the data enough that they felt comfortable in approving a novel vaccine. Surely releasing a USB stick with the documents on it shouldn't take 50x the time to analyze and produce the documents in the first place. Producing documents in response to a FOIA request isn't just a matter of simply copying them. If the documents contain anything that is not legal to release to the general public (such as personal information of patients) that has to be redacted first.

perryizgr8 5y ago
Sure, and that should not take 50 years for a document that took a year to create and analyse well enough to authorise the vaccine based on the findings.
- Uberphallus 5y ago
  Reviewing/analysing data and filtering it are dramatically different tasks. With raw data, most of the heavy lifting is done by your data analysis stack, you don't crunch numbers yourself. Complying with FOIA requests though, is largely manual work. The FDA has 14,000 employees; its FOIA office has 10, and they go at roughly 80,000 pages per month, meaning each employee does 8,000 pages per month, or roughly 400 per working day per employee, less than a minute per page. That to my non expert opinion sounds pretty fast. That speed has been appropriate until now that the plaintiffs want 4 months' worth of FDA FOIA work for yesterday. I agree that there should be a solution for these cases, but it's this particular FOIA request that's the anomaly, not the FDA way of work.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    If the FDA is not able to deliver our documents to us in time, maybe it is time to shut it down. Let public do the research and let consumers decide if they want to take the vaccine based on available results.
    - 5y ago