If the FDA is not able to deliver our documents to us in time, maybe it is time to shut it down. Let public do the research and let consumers decide if they want to take the vaccine based on available results.
More sensibly, if we want the FDA to make delivering a particular set of documents a sizable piece of its job, we should (through Congress) direct that and allocate appropriate funding for that purpose.
From a Reuters article on it: They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine."
So it really sounds like this is just part of the course of making sausage of approval. You have someone already embedded in the licensure project/process where this is all (very likely largely automagically) handled as it is always expected to be released to the public.
A lot of cash was dumped into fast and extensive R&D, trials and production scaling because of the urgency of the situation, and along comes an insane documentation backlog.
To put in perspective, the original HPV vaccine R&D and trial spanned over 7 years with 25,000 patients (of which only 20,000 women), and assuming the documentation was provided to the FDA as it was produced, it could be FOIA'd relatively quickly.
Pfizer/BioNTech did the same, with almost double the patients, in just over 6 months.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.