The Biden administration seeks to shield information about adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines until long after the November elections, according to a report published Thursday.
The conservative website JustTheNews.com, or JTN, reported that the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services have asked a federal judge to block access to data kept in a private database linked to the nation’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, orVAERS.
The VAERS tracks details of patients affected by adverse reactions, up to and including death, attributable to vaccines.
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JTN reported that it filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CDC and HHS for the secret data in January. The outlet and America First Legal, a legal aid group formed by former advisers to former President Donald Trump, sued the Biden administration in February after the agencies failed to adequately comply with the FOIA requests.
That lawsuit cited U.S. government officials, news reports and private-sector scientists who worked with the government on VAERS data and who publicly admitted the private database with vital safety information specific to COVID-19 jabs exists, JTN reported.
It appears that the Food and Drug Administration is the keeper of the secret data.
This week, the Biden administration argued that the FDA staff is too overwhelmed to comply with the FOIA requests.
The agency cited “an unprecedented workload requiring FOIA productions involving approximately 5.7 million pages of COVID-19 vaccine records,” JTN reported.
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The agencies asked the notoriously anti-Trump U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to block the release of the data for at least 18 months, well into 2026.
Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s general counsel and vice president, told JTN that this was “a typical government excuse.”
“‘Oh, we’re so busy, we don’t have the resources to help provide you, the American people with the information that you need,’” Hamilton said. “So you just need to wait until 18 months from now. And maybe you’ll get to see it, maybe you won’t. And what they’re hoping to do is stretch this out to the point where everybody forgets about it,” he added.
Hamilton noted that the administration’s argument is undercut by evidence that the FDA had sufficient resources to post internet memes during the pandemic.
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“Everyone has a right to know,” Hamilton said. “People need to have the right to engage in informed consent before they’re about to engage in some kind of medical procedure. People have the right to know things that are about their health, about the risks, and if there’s any benefits, certainly, but if there’s all of the risks.”
“They need to know what the government knows, and the fact that we’re having to sue with y’all to try to get access to this information, just to provide people with what they need to make their own decision, should be totally unacceptable and shocking to every American,” he added.
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