A federal court in Texas has given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until 30 September to release the first batch of data on adverse covid vaccination events that has been collected by the agency via its V-safe app
The order, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas-Austin Division, comes after a series of lawsuits filed by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), an Austin-based nonprofit “focused on the scientific integrity of vaccines and [the] pharmaceutical industry.”
The Defender reports: According to ICAN, the court order requires the CDC to release the first batch of 19 months’ worth of data collected from millions of participants who reported adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination via the V-safe app between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 31, 2022.
In all, the CDC will be required to release more than 137 million health V-safe entries.
The CDC describes V-safe as a smartphone app that “provides personalized and confidential check-ins via text messages and web surveys,” enabling users to “quickly and easily share with CDC how you, or your dependent, feel after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.”
According to the CDC, “This information helps CDC monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in near real time,” adding that the purpose of the V-safe app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.”
Public will ‘see for themselves the actual self-reported data’
The data collected via the V-safe app is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” with only the CDC having “access to the individualized survey data.”
Oracle’s access is limited to “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.”
This distinction led to the main thrust of ICAN’s lawsuits against the CDC. ICAN argued that “based on the CDC’s own documentation, the data submitted to V-safe is already available in deidentified form (with no personal health information) and could be immediately released to the public.”
ICAN submitted three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the deidentified data collected via V-safe, “in the same form in which Oracle can currently access it.”
However, ICAN said, the CDC “had apparently not read its own documentation regarding V-safe” and refused ICAN’s requests, claiming “information in the app is not deidentified.”
Even when ICAN clarified its FOIA request to specifically ask for “all data deidentified after [emphasis original] it was submitted to the V-safe app,” the CDC “administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.”
ICAN responded by suing the CDC in federal court in December 2021, via its attorney, Aaron Siri, for the release of this data.
