Days prior to today’s scheduled release of a tranche of documents related to the Pfizer COVID vaccine, the pharmaceutical company asked a federal court to let it intervene before any information is released.
It’s the latest development in an ongoing court case that began with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT).
PHMPT asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release all documents related to its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine and full approval of the Pfizer-Comirnaty COVID vaccine.
Pfizer on Jan. 21 submitted two filings to the court: a motion to intervene in the case “for a limited purpose,” and an accompanying “memorandum of points and authorities” supporting the motion.
Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Jan. 6 issued an order requiring the FDA to release 12,000 pages of documents by Jan. 31 and an additional 55,000 pages per month thereafter, until the release of the nearly 400,000 pages of documents is complete.
Pfizer claims to support the disclosure of the documents, but asked to intervene in the case to ensure that information exempt from disclosure will not be “disclosed inappropriately.”
It remains unclear how Pfizer defines “inappropriately” or “for a limited purpose,” or why it waited two weeks after Judge Pittman’s order, and only days before the Jan. 31 scheduled release of 12,000 pages to file its motion.
Pfizer claims it was unaware of the case until executives read news reports about it in December 2021, despite the fact that the case garnered coverage from major news outlets, including Reuters, in November of that year.
