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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

I see what you are saying, yet I wonder about the logistics of this. I doubt these a minimum wage jobs. Surely it takes a knowledgeable person who is willing to do this kind of tedious work. How many people fit the requirements? Do they have to live in a particular geographic location? Everyone is having trouble hiring people. Is the government any different? I assume they have to go through background checks and get trained. How long does that take? How many other FOIA requests do they have in the backlog? Is there a risk of the current 10 people quitting if the work load becomes to onerous? Can they really ramp up to get it all done by March? Maybe if the government threw insane amounts of money at problem. I don’t like tedious exacting work, but I’d happily do it for 1 million dollars a day.

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Get 20x the staffing and see if these questions resolve themselves. It's not a challenge to hire more than 10 people, and training time is going to be significantly less than 55 years.

Why would they be paying you a million dollars a day again?

Because I hate that kind of work so I wouldn’t do it unless they make it worth my while.

Consider it spending to prevent vaccine hesitancy. It would probably be more effective then a advertising campaign with the same money (provided the documents indicate everything is on the up and up) as it stands this looks bad and will push people further away.

The people hesitating to get the vaccine aren't doing it for scientific reasons in the vast majority of cases and nothing will convince them short of losing their job or similar negative consequences.

That's a strawman considering the overwhelming majority of people taking vaccine aren't doing it for scientific reasons either. They're taking it because of social pressure, virtue signal, fear, etc. but certainly not knowledge about science since less than 1% of the population is PhD educated and know anything about how science is done in the first place.

I don’t think that’s true at all. I don’t worry about polio, smallpox, etc. because of vaccines. I got vaccinated as soon as possible because vaccines have been proven to work. Absolutely nobody pressured me and I certainly don’t care what other people think.

So only PhD's know how to science. Guess my master's in EE doesn't mean jack then. Why am I even trying to read academic papers or science journals related to my job? I mean I don't even have a PhD...

What evidence is there that more lives would be saved by diverting FDA employees from other tasks (like evaluating the safety of drugs, vaccines, medical devices, food, etc) to redacting trade secrets from documents that on the order of 10^0 people will read? How does DDOSing the FOIA unit of the FDA undermine the wholely separate review process that conclusively found both mRNA vaccines to be completely safe and extremely effective at preventing serious harm? How could that be more persuasive than the fact that (per the NYTimes COVID tracker) unvaccinated people make up 6/7ths of new daily cases and 12/13ths of new daily deaths?

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