The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants an 18-month pause in litigation over its refusal to hand over key safety data on the COVID-19 vaccines.

The request is opposed by two groups that sued the FDA, trying to force the release of the records on possible COVID-19 vaccine side effects following Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) denials.

FDA officials say a federal court should implement the pause because of orders in other cases that require the agency to produce a certain amount of records each month.

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As in 55 years beyond.

That’s how long the Food & Drug Administration in court papers this week proposes it should be given to review and release the trove of vaccine-related documents responsive to the request. If a federal judge in Texas agrees, plaintiffs Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency can expect to see the full record in 2076.

The 1967 FOIA law requires federal agencies to respond to information requests within 20 business days. However, the time it takes to actually get the documents “will vary depending on the complexity of the request and any backlog of requests already pending at the agency,” according to the government’s central FOIA website.

Justice Department lawyers representing the FDA note in court papers that the plaintiffs are seeking a huge amount of vaccine-related material – about 329,000 pages.

The plaintiffs, a group of more than 30 professors and scientists from universities including Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown, filed suit in September in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, seeking expedited access to the records. They say that releasing the information could help reassure vaccine skeptics that the shot is indeed “safe and effective and, thus, increase confidence in the Pfizer vaccine.”

But the FDA can’t simply turn the documents over wholesale. The records must be reviewed to redact “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials,” wrote DOJ lawyers in a joint status report filed Monday.

The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests.

“By processing and making interim responses based on 500-page increments, FDA will be able to provide more pages to more requesters, thus avoiding a system where a few large requests monopolize finite processing resources and where fewer requesters’ requests are being fulfilled,” DOJ lawyers wrote, pointing to other court decisions where the 500-page-per-month schedule was upheld.

Civil division trial lawyer Courtney Enlow referred my request for further comment to the DOJ public affairs office, which did not respond.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that their request should be top priority, and that the FDA should release all the material no later than March 3, 2022.

“This 108-day period is the same amount of time it took the FDA to review the responsive documents for the far more intricate task of licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,” wrote Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad in New York and John Howie of Howie Law in Dallas in court papers.

“The entire purpose of the FOIA is to assure government transparency,” they continued. “It is difficult to imagine a greater need for transparency than immediate disclosure of the documents relied upon by the FDA to license a product that is now being mandated to over 100 million Americans under penalty of losing their careers, their income, their military service status, and far worse.”

They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine.”

Given the intense public interest in the vaccine, the plaintiffs’ lawyers say that the FDA “should have been preparing to release (the data) simultaneously with the licensure. Instead, it has done the opposite.”

Siri declined comment.

To meet the plaintiffs’ proposed FOIA deadline, the FDA would have to process a daunting 80,000 pages a month. But the plaintiffs note that the FDA has 18,000 employees and a budget of $6 billion and “has itself said that there is nothing more important than the licensure of this vaccine and being transparent about this vaccine.”

To be sure, most people — including many who sanctimoniously proclaim “I do my own research” — lack the expertise to evaluate the information.

But the plaintiffs, who also include overseas professors from the UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Canada, appear to be well-positioned to do so.

As Siri and Howe argue, “Reviewing this information will settle the ongoing public debate regarding the adequacy of the FDA’s review process.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman has set a scheduling conference for December 14 in Fort Worth to consider the timeline for processing the documents.

Opinions expressed here are those of the author. Reuters News, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence and freedom from bias.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Jenna Greene
Jenna Greene writes about legal business and culture, taking a broad look at trends in the profession, faces behind the cases, and quirky courtroom dramas. A longtime chronicler of the legal industry and high-profile litigation, she lives in Northern California. Reach Greene at jenna.greene@thomsonreuters.com

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants-55-years-process-foia-request-over-vaccine-data-2021-11-18/

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(Natural News) A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an Ann Arbor, Mich., law firm has turned up evidence of a widespread Islamic propaganda campaign being waged against public school teachers in the state and elsewhere.

As reported by The Gateway Pundit, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) became concerned about Christian-bashing Islamic materials being force-fed to teachers after being notified of a mandatory two-day training course presented by a Muslim consultant hired by Michigan’s Novi Community Schools District.

The law center “filed a FOIA request for documents related to this two-day Islamic training workshop and discovered that the teachers were being told lies about Islamic terrorism, jihad, and Sharia law,” TGP reported.

What’s more, teachers were being told by a Muslim consultant for Culture Links LLC, Huda Essa, a hijab-clad Arab woman from Dearborn, that white males are more dangerous than Islamic jihadists and terrorists.

“We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers,” said Richard Thompson, TMLC’s president and chief counsel.

“This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public school systems,” he continued. “No other religion gets this kind of special treatment in our schools.”

The notion that “white males” present a bigger “terrorist threat” in the U.S. comes from mass shootings over the past several years, the majority of which have indeed been committed by young, white men. However, the vast majority of those attacks were not considered acts of domestic terrorism, so to characterize them that was is factually incorrect. (Related: Astonishing bias: 452 Islamic terror attacks in 31 countries just THIS YEAR (so far) and zero coverage from the media.)

The lie has been repeated by Muslim members of Congress as well such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

As for the Muslim curriculum uncovered by TMLC, the legal group noted that over the past five years, the school district in question has not presented similar teacher-training seminars that focused on Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion — just Islam.

This is all part of the Left’s efforts to destroy American culture

The center noted further in a press release: 

Most disappointing was the fact that of the more than 400 teachers attending the workshop, not one teacher challenged Essa’s denigration of Christianity or attacks on America.

The legal organization reviewed scores of internal school documents as well as audio recordings of Essa’s presentation, uncovering a raft of falsehoods and errors of omission the center believes were intended to deceive course participants.

For instance, she provided “no truthful information” regarding Sharia law and jihad, which are considered some of the most important tenets of the Islamic religion. All references to terrorism were depicted as having nothing at all to do with Islam, and white Christian males were depicted as being more threatening and dangerous than Muslim extremists.

TMLC officials also found that the materials Essa presented were not celebratory of “patriotic Americans who believe in our nation’s exceptionalism,” according to the press release.

What’s more, she’s been spreading her “trash American first” propaganda to a growing list of American colleges and universities. Her client list includes professional educator associations throughout her home state of Michigan but also schools in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and others.

The materials are presented under the guise of ‘spreading diversity,’ but again, the curriculum is distinctly anti-American and focused only on spreading an often false view of Islam. She also believes that the Koran, the Muslim holy book, is superior to the Christian Bible, according to the law center’s review of her materials.

It’s not hard to see what the Left is attempting to do with the spread of counter-cultural materials: Destroy American traditions, undermine our founding, and — eventually — replace our republican form of government with an enslaving tyranny.

Source: https://www.dcclothesline.com/2019/08/27/legal-firm-uncovers-taxpayer-funded-islamic-propaganda-that-bashes-christianity-is-being-forced-on-teachers-students/

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