The Food and Drug Administration was told that it can't take 75 years to release COVID-19 vaccine data. On Thursday, a federal judge in Texas ordered the FDA to greatly increase the number of documents it releases each month that pertain to the agency's approval process for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency launched a Freedom of Information Act suit against the FDA in August. The international group consists of "public health professionals, medical professionals, scientists, and journalists," including academics and medical experts from Yale, Harvard Medical School, and UCLA.
The nonprofit organization "exists solely to obtain and disseminate the data relied upon by the FDA to license COVID-19 vaccines" and "takes no position on the data other than that it should be made publicly available to allow independent experts to conduct their own review and analyses."
The FDA said it could only release 12,000 pages by the end of January and a "minimum" of 500 pages a month thereafter – which means it could be the year 2097 before all of the documents are made public.
