The general public rightfully has a very low trust of the gov't and this certainly adds more validity to their distrust.
Throw 6 people at it, throw in review processes, maybe you could get it done in a couple years. Say 5 to hedge.
That discrepency needs explaining, and the bar for acceptable excuses is high, and not met.
The FDA evaluated (very strongly) for a Very Specific criteria. Efficacy of the vaccine against a disease, versus possible complications. It is FREQUENT that medical trials collect enough personal information to ruin the lives of those involved, so that any commonalities or patterns of negative incidents among them can be connected to ancillary risks.
To release documents and make them public record should probably take a completely different process than traditional discovery. In that the relevant evidence should be extracted, and as much PII as possible removed entirely, and redacted on the pages that are released.
It might be more appropriate to disclose the equivalent of table headers and an evaluation of if data was missing, relevant but within tolerances or above/beneath typical measure. Just like with image censorship true redaction must destroy the accuracy of underlying data for security.
If there is really no answer between blind trust and dying of old age, .... there is no 'if' actually, it's simply unacceptible. Neither this data, nor any government policies based on it, are "acts of god" that humanity just has to live with like solar flares. They are both created by humans and there is simply no excuse for even attempting to float any such proposal as "we'll dribble this data out for 50 years" It doesn't matter what the logistical problems are.
Logistical problems are the most easily solvable problems. They require little to no artistic muse or genius. You just work on them, very plodding straightforward work.
For instance, you don't have the budget to do the work the old brute force way? Well considering the alternative is over 50 F-ing years and who knows how many man-years, that equates to a rather large budget to develop some better process, and then use it. Like a volunteer citizen science program complete with training certifications and cross-checking and oversight and accountability and everything necessary to maintain full integrity. Let's say that project is huge and takes TEN YEARS just to develop the procedures and stuff. Even something pie in the sky like that is still a fraction of 55 years! And really, even a single reasonably educated staffer couldn't develop at least the outline in say, one year? A whole year?
No matter what parts of this problem you want to look at, this "500 pages per month" BS still just does not add up, even if you pretend you're stupid and just accept the stated difficulties as actually being the problem.
Ok enough of that..,setting aside debunking the problem or coming up with new solutions to the problem, switching gears to "what would make it not a problem?" like in a perfect world, if you could have anything etc:
It sounds like what should happen is, the data should be supplied with the identifiers seperated by the original submitter. Like a standard that everyone follows where when you write the reports in the first place, everyone is subject A who works at employer X and lives in county Z, and the legend is in a seperate part of the document which is trivial to withhold.
Put both the job of segregating the data and the liability for doing it correctly on the submitter when they are creating the data in the first place.
Then the FDA or other similar body only has to do a reasonable minimal due dilligence to realease the anonymised data. If there are mistakes, make that the applicant's responsibility.
> No matter what parts of this problem you want to look at, this "500 pages per month" BS still just does not add up, even if you pretend you're stupid and just accept the stated difficulties as actually being the problem.
This is a processing quota per applicant. I agree it's a problem that the system isn't designed to require initial submitters to produce public-release-ready reports as well; though we would presumably need at least an N% (E.G. 20-25%) budget increase for the government across the board.
> It sounds like what should happen is, the data should be supplied with the identifiers separated by the original submitter. Like a standard that everyone follows where when you write the reports in the first place, everyone is subject A who works at employer X and lives in county Z, and the legend is in a separate part of the document which is trivial to withhold.
> Put both the job of segregating the data and the liability for doing it correctly on the submitter when they are creating the data in the first place.
Yes, this is also a logical solution, the inputs to the (government body) processes should have public-release-ready versions as well.
For both cases, please see my parent comment about the necessity of destructive fuzzing to sufficiently frost (ed window) the sensitive data.