<story><title>FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over vaccine data</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants-55-years-process-foia-request-over-vaccine-data-2021-11-18/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>walterbell</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; 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”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn&amp;#x27;t this separation be designed into the process for data management during the clinical trial?&lt;p&gt;Almost all content is managed by computer systems that are designed to protect PII and intellectual property, with managed restriction or redaction for external distribution. If it did not take decades for computer-structured clinical trial data to move across the corporation-&amp;gt;government boundary, why would it take decades to move from government-&amp;gt;citizens?&lt;p&gt;If necessary, the reports can be re-exported from the corporate systems used for clinical trial data management, with &lt;i&gt;additional&lt;/i&gt; computer-enforced redaction of sensitive data. There is also AI-assisted software used in legal discovery, which can quickly parse a large document corpus, to flag material for human review.</text></comment>
<story><title>FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over vaccine data</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants-55-years-process-foia-request-over-vaccine-data-2021-11-18/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adolph</author><text>&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;[Plaintiffs] 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.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>