4 ms·

I don't believe he's arguing for the release of personal medical information, he's arguing for the automatic release of the documents redacted of personal medic

I don't believe he's arguing for the release of personal medical information, he's arguing for the automatic release of the documents redacted of personal medical information. In other words, the FDA should have been prepared for this all along. Additionally, if Pfizer were to have been told to be prepared to redact PII, I'm sure authors could have easily marked PII during authoring for quick identification and removal. Someone had to write this stuff, it didn't just appear in the ether.

kube-system 5y ago
It's not that easy. The amount of information that the someone at the FDA might need to do their job is definitely not bounded by the limitations in FOIA, they need the details. The FOIA process has to happen afterwards by the FDA anyway by law, regardless of what Pfizer provided. Additionally, the healthcare professionals who collected the data are also not qualified to do FOIA compliance, nor is it always possible to tell if a single data element will be PII after it is compiled with other information at a later date, because PII can be indirectly inferred from other elements of information.