The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will have eight months — not the 75 years it requested — to release all documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
In his ruling, Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, quoted President John F. Kennedy, writing, “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
Judge Pittman rejected the FDA’s claim that it could release redacted versions of documents at a rate of only 500 pages per month, which would have meant the full cache of documents wouldn’t become public until 2096.
The documents in question relate to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA.
