Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not facts and claims...common sense.

Nothing suggests these folks are acting in good faith. They showed no willingness to bound an obviously over-scoped request. It is sad the judge didn't see this for what it is.

They are abusing the process to make the FDA and Pfizer look bad by requesting an absurd number of things and not scoping out things that they obviously are not entitle to. Pfizer, like it or not is entitled to have their trade secrets protected. Like it or not, Pfizer and teh FDA have a responsibility to protect the private healthcare information of patients who participated. That takes time. If I was a vaccine trial participant I would be suing the pants off these loons.

I feel like I'm living in crazy town...go read the emails that these loons attached of their own email conversation with the FDA. one person (the FDA rep) is trying to have a serious and productive conversation, the guy from PCP (or whatever) wants to stand on a street corner and shout. They attached this in support of their own lawsuit

Extraordinary claims require at least some effort. It isn't the job of everyone to engage and disprove everything stupid people say...at some point saying 'this dude is a loon' is a sufficient counter to 'why won't you debate me'. The preponderance of evidence, including engagement with things like the American Conservative and Joe Rogan as a source of healthcare information meaningfully suggest against taking these people seriously and that's all that is necessary.

[0] https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/032-Appendix-in...

I have this old quaint idea that government shouldn’t have too many secrets. That an informed public requires open records.

to flip what you are saying around, I believe that every government record should be born publicly available unless explicitly rendered secret (under review, of course). That is, I shouldnt have to file a FOIA, the agency should file a “Request for Secrecy”

I think it’s quaint that HN is so confident they know what should and shouldn’t be kept confidential by the government without seeing them.

I dont. I specifically mentioned the mechanism that state secrets should be generated by: by the government proactively making something secret.

Otherwise everything is automatically an openly available record.

US citizens are legally entitled to this information.

>this information.

what information...exactly what information?

if I file a FOIA request for the presidents tax return and it gets denied for a legal exemption is that the government hiding something?

There is a FOIA process, there are things that are exempt from disclosure - that is part of the law as well.

FDA follows a process, outlined here: https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/023-FDA-Appendi... (page 5+)

In reality, the plaintiffs are the ones slowing the process of releasing this information down by being unreasonable. it means FDA is reviewing and denying OBVIOUSLY privileged or exempt documents that the group only asked for to then waive about the number of documents that the FDA 'wOuLdN't DiScLoSe'.

If you are playing quantitative games with FOIA request document numbers you are acting in bad faith. When you are trying to scope as many exempt documents as possible into your request so you can later use that number to push your narrative, you are acting in bad faith. Because when you aren't interested in the content of the documents, nothing you are doing has anything to do with serious efforts at transparency.

We are not talking about a request for POTUS tax returns.

The process is defined by the Freedom of Information Act itself and not the Department of Health and Human Services. Here is the act https://www.justice.gov/oip/freedom-information-act-5-usc-55... and by law there only 9 exemption categories that allow a US agency to withhold information. They are: 1. classified information for national defense or foreign policy 2. internal personnel rules and practices 3. information that is exempt under other laws 4. trade secrets and confidential business information 5. inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters that are protected by legal privileges 6. personnel and medical files 7. law enforcement records or information 8. information concerning bank supervision 9. geological and geophysical information

> We are not talking about a request for POTUS tax returns.

You're right, we're talking about random private citizens medical information, which falls under 6. That's what the majority of the pages requested are, and why it'll take so long to redact them: they're mostly clinical notes about people like you and me. The relevant information that won't be redacted is already publicly accessible.

Dont worry, Federal agencies aren't shy to redact.

Or perhaps they’ll be “anonymized” which is tech’s go to term for running roughshod over our secrecy.

People like you and me who willingly participated in a public funded study. If Pfizer did not anonymize the data from the beginning that is foolish at best.

…they wouldn’t be allowed to anonymize data they submit to the fda

Honestly this discussion is insane, this entire discussion presumes a bunch of people selling snake oil are more credible than the people trying to make sure drugs are safe. The “well the fda screws up sometimes” is only useful to that argument if you have already picked the narrative you want. Otherwise it’s like saying I’d rather go to see with a cannibal I have never met than my younger brother because he bit me once when we were kids.

You gotta realize that these gov agencies give bad faith arguments to say that they can't release records routinely. These government agencies know full fucking well that these records will be responsive to FOIA and yet they still don't make efforts to make it accessible and releasable to the public. Same goes to Pfizer. It's our responsibility as a public to make sure important information like this isn't being hidden.

Their litigation is aggressive, there's no doubt there. But does that mean the information isn't any less important? Back when the pandemic started, a lot of FOIA nerds were hesitant to submit FOIAs because of the issues around quarantine, WFH etc. At the end though, transparency is such a fundamentally important part of our understanding of our own governance that it's important that we don't hold back on important issues like this.

It doesn't even really matter too much if the organization won't use the docs themselves. Their litigation is making it available to the public. If they're not going to look through them, someone will.

Trust the science. Btw, my name is Science ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com