(disclaimer: my experience with FOIA is mostly at the state level and though I've read, used, and litigated federal FOIA issues, I'm no expert there)
Transparency doesn't work in isolation. If there's a problem where the release of 450,000 pages of patient information is so difficult that it can't be done, then there's a fundamental process fuckup that should be corrected. For example, if everything's on paper, then the process failure is in a lack of transcription. If it's because private information is typed in a form, that form should be broken up in a way so that the important private information is typed into another field. Generally there are ways to make sure these issues don't happen -- from the beginning. Keep in mind, these people are aware of the existence of FOIA and the possibility that these records would be subject to FOIA. These processes should be built with that in-mind, especially considering the importance of the information.
It's such a big deal that in states like Illinois, the law disallows the use of the unduly burdensome exemption if the gov agency doesn't respond within the time limits of the statute. Takes 10k hours? Big deal, shoulda responded in time.
A lot of these issues stem from the fact that in so many cases, the agency's estimates are either beyond any possible worst case scenario (ie, unrealistic), or an intentionally naive estimate in order to urge the requester to go away. If we take these public agencies at face value that something would take forever without litigation, then they can easily just make it a routine process to call something unduly burdensome, so it's important to call them out on their shit. See: https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...
I would imagine it's like technical debt. There's benefits to paying that debt down, but there are always other issues that have higher priority. Sure, the software should have been architectured to be easily extensible / system should have been set up to make it easy to release half a million pages of documents, but this update has to be released in time to beat the competition / these drug approvals needs to be completed to save lives.
The argument on technical debt isn't wrong, but it doesn't fully take into account the importance of this information and the legal requirements these agencies are held to. Just because it's difficult doesn't mean the information shouldn't be released. If we accept that the request is difficult as a reason to not release the records, then they'll never get released. Once that seed's planted, it's so unbelievably hard to come out of. It's something you see with agencies that never get held accountable to their lack of transparency.
Absolutely. Even with highly profitable global megacorps, technical debt is an issue, but eventually they have to pay the piper. I'm not sure if it is true in this case, but my image of governmental agencies are that they are perpetually underfunded and short-staffed, so it must be an even greater difficulty to choose between what should be done and what must be done.
Remember pfizers own report and raw data are not the only options, it's a false dichotomy.
In order to make the report in the first place, Pfizer had to preprocess the data to intermediate, tabulated formats. However, this data is their secret IP, which in and of itself is absolutely insane, given that we're moving in the direction of mandates.
I don't get how one of the most foul industries – by public track record — suddenly get a carte blanche from otherwise sane and critical people. There are so many scandals in Pharma, and suddenly overnight you're a conspiracy theorist if you want independent scientists to double check the biggest public health mandate in history.
This is very useful information, though. People can analyze this to find out if there is any increased risk of adverse effects (or not) by all kinds of factors that hasn't been released. Things like underlying medical conditions.
Some people with certain medical conditions are vaccine-hesitant because of their health condition. If this data can prove that people with certain health conditions aren't at any increased risk from the vaccine, it could mean more people get vaccinated.
Sorry, no. These gov agencies don't tell us what information they have (often intentionally!) and so we can't always be explicit about what information we want. If they told us exactly the extent of information they have, then we wouldn't need to play these silly little games of requesting more than what necessarily exists.. but what choice do we have?
