4 ms·
I find it highly suspicious that removing PII would take 75 years. That's laughable. That's deleting some columns from a database.
by gsibble 4y ago
I find it highly suspicious that removing PII would take 75 years. That's laughable. That's deleting some columns from a database.
- mikeyouse 4y agoIt's not a database - they're literal PDFs of patient charts with doctor notes. They would need to have a human review every page.
- gsibble 4y agoI could build software to automate that and it wouldn't take 75 years. 75 years is a joke.
- mikeyouse 4y agoOkay. Cool. Again, 75 years is just a dumb calculation of the number of pages responsive to the FOIA request divided by their 'free capacity' to review 500 pages per month. They weren't suggesting to actually spend the next 75 years doing it, they were hoping the requester would narrow their request to something relevant. You could just have congress authorize 10 more staff, increase their capacity to 50,000 pages/month and you'd have it in 9 months. There's no technical limitation, there's no conspiracy theory, it's just a question of staff time [they are legally obligated to process FOIAs, including all of the 'regular order' ones, so they can't just drop all of their other work to focus on this one request]
- gsibble 4y agoWhy is the federal taxpayer paying for removing PII from a Pfizer study? Shouldn't Pfizer pay for it? I'm confused.
- mikeyouse 4y agoPfizer isn't subject to FOIA - the government is. To get approval for the vaccine to be sold, Pfizer submits a massive amount of documentation to the FDA. They run studies with tens of thousands of patients and then do the typical statistics work to assess whether the vaccines were safe and effective (they were). They submit these studies along with all of the patient data collected during the trials and the FDA reviews the info to make their decision whether or not to approve the sale of the vaccine. These antivaxxers have decided that there must be something hidden in the patient files, so they filed a FOIA/lawsuit to have the FDA release all of these patient files. Those are the docs that would need to be scrubbed/anonymized. 450k pages of "Patient was administered vaccine, patient was fine".
- dangerface 4y agoWouldn't take people 75 years to do that, lawyers did discovery before computers and it didn't take them 75 years to do it.