A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make public the data it relied on to license Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, imposing a dramatically accelerated schedule that should result in the release of all information within about eight months . Reuters reports:"Even if the FDA may not see it this way, I think Pittman did the agency -- and the country -- a big favor by expediting the document production," writes Reuters' Jenna Greene. "Making the information public as soon as possible may help assuage the concerns of vaccine skeptics and convince them the product is safe.""Still, the FDA is likely to be hard-pressed to process 55,000 pages a month," Greene adds. "The office that reviews FOIA requests has just 10 employees, according to a declaration filed with the court by Suzann Burk, who heads the FDA's Division of Disclosure and Oversight Management. Burk said it takes eight minutes a page for a worker 'to perform a careful line-by-line, word-by-word review of all responsive records before producing them in response to a FOIA request.' [...] But as lawyers for the plaintiffs Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency pointed out in court papers (PDF), the FDA as of 2020 had 18,062 employees. Surely some can be dispatched to pitch in at the FOIA office."

Source: Slashdot.org

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