CDC sued for vaccine safety app data after multiple refusals
Lawsuit surrounds data from 'V-Safe' system used by CDC
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A nonprofit that is critical of vaccines is suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after the agency declined to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data on the effects of the coronavirus vaccine.
Announced Thursday, the lawsuit surrounds data from the "V-Safe" system used by the CDC to track patients' health after receiving the coronavirus vaccination. The group says the CDC has already provided Oracle, a government contractor, with the data in a deidentified form – or lacking personal information.
The CDC also tracks safety through its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and continues to say that the approved and authorized COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"V-safe data will be collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle," according to a CDC document.
Attorney Aaron Siri, who represents the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), said that the CDC initially refused to provide app data because it purportedly wasn't "deidentified" or stripped of personal information. When ICAN followed with a request for "all data submitted to v-safe and subsequently deidentified," the CDC rejected the request as duplicative of the original.
Lurie Children's hospital registered nurse Carolyn Ruyle prepares a dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Lurie Children's hospital Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"If this sounds ridiculous, it is because it is," said Siri. "The public should be outraged by the CDC’s games."
ICAN's lawsuit notes that the CDC said V-Safe was part of "the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history."
Department Of Health and Human Services, Hubert H. Humphrey Building on April 11, 2015, in Washington. (Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)
Siri, on behalf of another group, previously sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for more than 400,000 pages of information on the approval process for Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA had offered to release 12,000 documents by January and a minimum of 500 pages a month, which could mean it would be decades before all the documents would become public.
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Oracle did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment. The CDC said it doesn't comment on pending litigation.
"The federal government is thereby not only failing to provide the transparency necessary to earn the American people’s trust regarding these vaccines but is also failing to comply with FOIA," the lawsuit reads.