U.S. District Judge Orders the CDC to Release 7.8 Million Records of Public Responses from Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance System

Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) after being denied access to information following a Freedom of Information request (FOI) for all V-Safe text entries.

V-Safe is a smartphone-based platform, one of the CDC’s vaccine surveillance systems introduced during the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, enabling individuals to report potential side effects.

In the initial week following vaccination, users received daily text messages inquiring about their well-being. These messages contained a link to V-safe, where users could log in and answer follow-up questions. Participants who opted to continue received weekly check-in messages for up to 5 weeks. Depending on the responses, the CDC would initiate follow-up with individuals.

Each V-safe check-in asked participants about symptoms, offering 12 different checkboxes including chills, headache, joint pain, muscle or body aches, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, rash, or none. Additionally, participants could provide a text response of up to 250 characters. These text responses were the subject of the lawsuit and part of the Freedom of Information request by Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice.

The CDC argued that fulfilling the information request would burden the agency. However, Texas District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk stated in his ruling that "While the burden to produce the requested free-text responses may be heavy, this court does not find that it is unreasonable."

Judge Kacsmaryk ruled that the CDC must start producing the requested 7.8 million text responses over the next 12 months, starting on February 15, 2024.

You can review the ruling at the link below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dN2rdWR55N_W4Tl_73WX6XVVG-Yehd77/view?usp=sharing