We’re from the government, and we’re here to hurt you
/
Biden’s FDA Commissioner Robert Califf*
*Since Biden took office, health officials have been waiting for him to appoint a new head after Dr. Stephen Hahn, who was widely criticized by the scientific community for not taking a stronger stand against the Trump Administration’s support of unproven COVID-19 therapies, left the post in January.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), as its name suggests, is a medical transparency group that filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FDA for documents tied to its approval of Pfizer’s BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA went to court and informed the judge that it was totally willing to comply with the request—except that it will take almost 55 years to do so.
The Epoch Times reports that the FDA claims to possess 329,000 pages of documents responsive to PHMPT’s request. Further, the FDA posits that reviewing the documents and redacting exempt material will allow it to produce, at most, around 500 pages per month. At that rate, it will take 658 months—or 54 and 3/4 years to complete the requested production.It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021). Taking the FDA at its word, it conducted an intense, robust, thorough, and complete review and analysis of those documents in order to assure that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective for licensure. While it can conduct that intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public.
So, let’s get this straight. The federal government shields Pfizer from liability. Gives it billions of dollars. Makes Americans take its product. But won’t let you see the data supporting its product’s safety and efficacy. Who does the government work for?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course, but this one isn’t: Were you lying then, or are you lying now?
