Feds try to delay release of non-public COVID vaccine safety data until at least 2026
Biden administration seeks 18-month stay before processing Just the News open records request, America First Legal calls delay request "shocking."
The Biden administration is seeking to delay until at least 2026 the release of COVID-19 vaccine safety data that has been kept outside the government’s normal adverse events reporting system.
The Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services asked U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton this week to issue an 18-month stay that keeps them from having to release the Food and Drug Administration’s data to Just the News under the Freedom of Information Act.
The federal agencies alleged that “exceptional circumstances” exist to necessitate the delay in compliance with the open records law because the FDA is stretched thin by numerous other requests for public information related to the pandemic.
The agency “has been dealing with an unprecedented workload requiring FOIA productions involving approximately 5.7 million pages of COVID-19 vaccine records in a compressed timeframe,” the government argued in the motion filed Tuesday night.
The government revealed it has secured stays in seven other cases seeking records and asked Walton to do the same with the Just the News request. Federal lawyers claim the agency hired several new employees to try to speed up processing but that it can take up to two years to train new staff to process such requests.
“Thus, despite the Branch’s good-faith investment in increasing its future processing capacity by training new employees, its resources remain limited during this lengthy onboarding period,” the government claimed.
Just the News, which is represented in the case by the America First Legal public interest law firm, is opposing the stay and a status conference is scheduled Thursday before the judge.
/moar
“This is a typical government excuse which is,’ Oh, we're so busy, we don't have the resources to help provide you, the American people with the information that you need,’” Hamilton told the Just the News, No Noise television show.
“So you just need to wait until 18 months from now. And maybe you'll get to see it, maybe you won't. And what they're hoping to do is stretch this out to the point where everybody forgets about it,” he added.
/moar
“They need to know what the government knows, and the fact that we're having to sue with y'all to try to get access to this information, just to provide people with what they need to make their own decision, should be totally unacceptable and shocking to every American,” he added.
Just the News and America First Legal sued the Biden administration in February, asking the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to order the Department of Health and Human Services to comply with two Freedom of Information Act requests to the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seeking COVID-19 reactions data kept in a back-end, nonpublic system to the nation’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
/moar
“The public-facing database contains only initial reports, while the private, back-end system contains all updates and corrections – such as a formal diagnosis, recovery, or death,” the lawsuit explained.
/moar
“The public VAERS database reportedly did not include an autopsy examiner’s conclusion that the death of a 15-year-old boy was caused by ‘stress cardiomyopathy following [his] second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine,’” the suit said.
Just the News filed FOIA requests for the back-end data with both the FDA and the CDC on Jan.6. The FDA assigned a control number for its request but never complied with providing any data, the suit said.
The CDC came back in February declining to provide any data, claiming the requested information “fell under the jurisdiction of the [FDA]” and “referred Mr. Solomon’s initial request to FDA and administratively closed the initial request,” the suit stated.
/moar
“They're going to continue to cover up the real the damage being done by these what I would consider now very dangerous, very suspect mRNA vaccines,” he said.
Drugmakers, the FDA and CDC have acknowledged there is evidence of adverse events like myocarditis – inflammation of the heart – but that such affects are rare and shouldn’t scare Americans from getting the shots.
In fact, the CDC recommended in February that Americans over the age of 65 should get an additional vaccine booster in 2024.
June 19, 2024 11:35pm Updated: June 20, 2024 7:48am
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/health/feds-try-delay-release-non-public-covid-vaccine-safety-data-until-least-2026?utm_source=mux&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=social-media-autopost