In a “huge win for transparency,” a federal judge this month ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to disclose the entirety of a critical COVID-19 vaccine safety database to independent researchers and the public.
The ruling requires the CDC to produce more than 7.8 million free-text reports detailing adverse reactions submitted by COVID-19 vaccine recipients through the V-safe monitoring app. The agency must release the texts according to a strict schedule over the next year.
The judge rejected the CDC’s claims that confidentiality concerns and resource limitations prevented the agency from publicly releasing the trove of first-hand testimonies.
Instead, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division, embraced arguments from the plaintiffs — the nonprofit watchdog group Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice — that obscuring the data enabled potentially misleading safety conclusions by hindering full understanding of the vaccines’ impacts.