From https://drsforchoice.org/

BREAKING NEWS

Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice is pleased to announce a significant win for transparency! United States District Court Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk has issued a thoughtful, insightful, and incredible 30-page decision that orders the CDC to release the 7.8 million free text fields from the Covid-19 v-safe program to the public!

The CDC must release hundreds of thousands of these entries each month and all the entries must be released on or before January 15, 2025! CDC had argued that it never had to turn over the entries to the public because it was too burdensome to redact the entries. The Court vehemently disagreed and granted expedited processing, recognizing that “Predictably, the American public now seeks access to COVID-related papers to ensure that relevant government policies were — and still are — supported and justified by the available data.”

The first production of at least 390,000 free text entries is required to be produced by February 15, 2024 and all data received will be posted on this site for the public’s use. The full decision is available here.

Court ruling: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/texas/txndce/2:2023cv00102/378122/40/0.pdf

Excerpts:

MEMORANDUM ORDER AND OPINION

… The Motion is GRANTED …

INTRODUCTION

…

V-safe collected two types of data from millions of Americans: (1) check-the-box options and (2) free-text responses.

Plaintiff seeks production of approximately 7.8 million freetext responses pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).

…

C. Plaintiff’s FOIA Request

While “Trust the Science” became something of a national slogan, 19 the American public’s trust in science and scientists are at an all-time low.20 It is with this background that Plaintiff aims to further the ideals pledged by the Biden-Harris administration: to “Promote trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability in our government”21 by making available for public access — and particularly for independent scientific and medical research — all of the relevant health data collected through the V-safe program. As the check-the-box data has already been released, it is the free-text response data Plaintiff seeks.

…