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Well I for one am glad that FOIA requests don't depend on whether you like the people filing them. I find it absolutely ridiculous that asking for this data is

Well I for one am glad that FOIA requests don't depend on whether you like the people filing them. I find it absolutely ridiculous that asking for this data is seen as a bad thing. Why are pharmaceutical companies suddenly beyond questioning?

Robotbeat 5y ago
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Humanity is who is asking for answers.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Looking for answers or looking for ammunition in an ideological war against vaccination?
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Hiding information and general untrustworthiness harms credibility, which is a chicken that's going to come home to roost the next time there's a public health crisis. The CDC blew a lot of its credibility with the (arguably noble) early lie about masks not working. Pharma companies probably don't have that much to lose. Now it's the FDA's turn. "We must hide legally-required-to-be-available information because some people may misuse it" is a path with unlimited abuse potential, best avoided.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Look, again, I’m not suggesting any legally required information should be hidden. But if you think the end result of releasing massive amount of even totally-above-board information is going to be increased public trust, then you must have sleepwalked the last 6 years. There’s a good case to be made that releasing this is the best course. But let’s not pretend that public trust won’t be eroded because it takes an order of magnitude more work to disprove bulls### than to make it up (or twist it) in the first place. And it isn’t any particularly information I’m talking about, simply the vast quantity involved. The vaccine becoming political is probably the worst thing to happen to humanity in the last 2-3 years. Worse probably than COVID itself. EDIT: just thought of one possible solution or at least mitigation to the “Bull### asymmetry principle” when combined with massive data dumps: Limit the amount of material that can be requested. Any specific dates or whatever could be requested within the stack. Or if a representative sample is desired, the entire dump is sectioned in pieces and each section is securely hashed. The one doing the request can then request, say, up to 100-1000 sections and each such section can then have its hash compared. That ensures the random selection is random to the satisfaction of the requesting party. And it limits the amount of bulls### that needs to be countered to some reasonable level. Otherwise, any attacker will be able to overwhelm the public with endless claims from a massive stash of requested documents. This doesn’t limit the amount of work for scrubbing PII, though, since you’d have to scrub it before hashing or the hashing wouldn’t be recreatable. But at least you’d limit the amount of unique bulls### that’d need to be countered.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      The FDA could've had the policy that the data is scrubbed and made available as its ingested. And, quite honestly, I see this complaint of theirs as one made in bad faith. Once they have no other choice, they'll comply in a lot faster than 3/4 of a fucking century. Really, I see FOIA requests as failures of government; as in they represent the government being poked to be transparent when transparency should be the default.
- colpabar 5y ago
  Of course people are going to cherry-pick things that suit their narrative from this massive amount of information. But that's the game. If there are questionable things in this data, then it's up to our public health officials to explain them. This vaccine is a new type of medicine that was produced faster than vaccine before it. It also seems to work. But regardless, we all deserve to see every bit of information about its production, especially now that people's jobs depend on them getting it.
geofft 5y ago
To be clear, I am not saying "This FOIA request is bad because I don't like the people filing them." I agree transparency is good, and I in fact think it should be the default, no FOIA necessary, including and perhaps especially for things like medical approvals. That means the assumption of it being made public should be built in at every step of the process, including notes of patient trials. I am simply responding to the comment above that asks, who are the people who are requesting the information, and what is their agenda. That is also a very important thing to know for a vibrant public discourse.
- colpabar 5y ago
  Fair enough; thanks for elaborating. I just can't help but think that pfizer did this on purpose - not making redacted versions of their data, knowing it would take the FDA forever to do that if it ever got FOIA'd.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Robotbeat 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Humanity is who is asking for answers.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Looking for answers or looking for ammunition in an ideological war against vaccination?
Karunamon 5y ago
Hiding information and general untrustworthiness harms credibility, which is a chicken that's going to come home to roost the next time there's a public health crisis. The CDC blew a lot of its credibility with the (arguably noble) early lie about masks not working. Pharma companies probably don't have that much to lose. Now it's the FDA's turn. "We must hide legally-required-to-be-available information because some people may misuse it" is a path with unlimited abuse potential, best avoided.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Look, again, I’m not suggesting any legally required information should be hidden. But if you think the end result of releasing massive amount of even totally-above-board information is going to be increased public trust, then you must have sleepwalked the last 6 years. There’s a good case to be made that releasing this is the best course. But let’s not pretend that public trust won’t be eroded because it takes an order of magnitude more work to disprove bulls### than to make it up (or twist it) in the first place. And it isn’t any particularly information I’m talking about, simply the vast quantity involved. The vaccine becoming political is probably the worst thing to happen to humanity in the last 2-3 years. Worse probably than COVID itself. EDIT: just thought of one possible solution or at least mitigation to the “Bull### asymmetry principle” when combined with massive data dumps: Limit the amount of material that can be requested. Any specific dates or whatever could be requested within the stack. Or if a representative sample is desired, the entire dump is sectioned in pieces and each section is securely hashed. The one doing the request can then request, say, up to 100-1000 sections and each such section can then have its hash compared. That ensures the random selection is random to the satisfaction of the requesting party. And it limits the amount of bulls### that needs to be countered to some reasonable level. Otherwise, any attacker will be able to overwhelm the public with endless claims from a massive stash of requested documents. This doesn’t limit the amount of work for scrubbing PII, though, since you’d have to scrub it before hashing or the hashing wouldn’t be recreatable. But at least you’d limit the amount of unique bulls### that’d need to be countered.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    The FDA could've had the policy that the data is scrubbed and made available as its ingested. And, quite honestly, I see this complaint of theirs as one made in bad faith. Once they have no other choice, they'll comply in a lot faster than 3/4 of a fucking century. Really, I see FOIA requests as failures of government; as in they represent the government being poked to be transparent when transparency should be the default.
colpabar 5y ago
Of course people are going to cherry-pick things that suit their narrative from this massive amount of information. But that's the game. If there are questionable things in this data, then it's up to our public health officials to explain them. This vaccine is a new type of medicine that was produced faster than vaccine before it. It also seems to work. But regardless, we all deserve to see every bit of information about its production, especially now that people's jobs depend on them getting it.

geofft 5y ago

To be clear, I am not saying "This FOIA request is bad because I don't like the people filing them." I agree transparency is good, and I in fact think it should be the default, no FOIA necessary, including and perhaps especially for things like medical approvals. That means the assumption of it being made public should be built in at every step of the process, including notes of patient trials. I am simply responding to the comment above that asks, who are the people who are requesting the information, and what is their agenda. That is also a very important thing to know for a vibrant public discourse.

colpabar 5y ago
Fair enough; thanks for elaborating. I just can't help but think that pfizer did this on purpose - not making redacted versions of their data, knowing it would take the FDA forever to do that if it ever got FOIA'd.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]