The vaccine hesitancy over COVID-19 is beginning to seep into other illnesses, as reports emerge that people are growing more skeptical of even routine jabs that have been with us for decades.
President Joe Biden, his administration, and his allies are largely to blame for this.
Although Biden advocates repeatedly for getting the shots developed by the Trump administration, to the point of violating Americans’ constitutional rights to administer them, he continues to wear a mask everywhere he goes.
He also has fueled doubts by raising the threshold for vaccine-driven herd immunity, suggesting the vaccinated will require more shots into the foreseeable future and keeping Americans in limbo by not setting a reasonable goal for declaring an end to the pandemic.
Atop all that, it’s doubtful the latest news out of Biden’s Food and Drug Administration will do little to assuage people’s doubts about the shots.
Reuters reported recently that a group of scientists called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the data the agency used as the basis for licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer has been the dose of choice for 58 percent of the more than 450 million vaccinations given to Americans so far.
As Reuters noted, the group argued that “releasing the information could help reassure vaccine skeptics that the shot is indeed ‘safe and effective and, thus, increase confidence in the Pfizer vaccine.’”
In response, lawyers for the federal government said the mountain of documents is quite extensive, running about 329,000 pages.
But the eye-popping aspect of their argument against complying with the request was the amount of time needed to do so.
It will take 55 years.
The government’s lawyers maintained that the FDA just can’t hand over the documents because of the need to redact “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials,” Reuters noted.
Instead, the FDA would prefer to release the documents in monthly 500-page chunks.
Which would take just short of 55 years.
Lawyers for the activists trying to pry open the FDA’s file cabinets told the court that was ridiculous.
Reuters noted that in court documents they argued the FDA, using the same documents their clients seek, approved Pfizer’s vaccine in just 108 days.
“The entire purpose of the FOIA is to assure government transparency,” the lawyers for the health care professionals said.
“It is difficult to imagine a greater need for transparency than immediate disclosure of the documents relied upon by the FDA to license a product that is now being mandated to over 100 million Americans under penalty of losing their careers, their income, their military service status, and far worse.”
The FDA, they note, “has itself said that there is nothing more important than the licensure of this vaccine and being transparent about this vaccine.”
Now, the agency balks at that transparency.
This FOIA controversy reveals the Biden administration’s COVID approach in a nutshell: scold Americans for not following “the science,” but then refuse to explain the science when it changes or, in this case, to allow them to see the science, while offering the requisite promise to “trust us.”
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