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What is the v-safe system you may ask? Since rolling out the Covid-19 vaccines, the FDA and CDC have stated that their primary safety monitoring system, VAERS, is unreliable. The CDC therefore deployed a new safety monitoring system for COVID-19 vaccines called “v-safe.” V-safe is a smartphone app that allows vaccine recipients to “tell CDC about any side effects after getting the COVID-19 vaccine.” The purpose of the app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.” With this new system, the CDC claims that these “vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.”
That all sounds great. And a CDC document explains that data submitted to v-safe is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” a private computer technology company, and that Oracle can access “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.” This means data submitted to v-safe is already available in deidentified form and could be immediately released to the public.
But yet, after we submitted a FOIA request to the CDC, on behalf of ICAN, to produce the deidentified v-safe data, the CDC acknowledged that “v-safe data contains approximately 119 million medical entries” but refused to produce that data by claiming that the “information in the app is not de-identified.” The CDC had apparently not read its own documentation regarding v-safe. But we had. So, we appealed this decision and submitted another request to the CDC that expressly asked only for any deidentified v-safe data, in the app or otherwise. Meaning, in the form that the CDC made the data available to Oracle. Incredibly, the CDC administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.
Let me break that down again. The first request was denied by the CDC because it claimed the request sought data in the app that was deidentified. But then the CDC closed the second request, which made clear it is seeking only deidentified data (in the app or otherwise), by claiming the second request was duplicative of the first request! If this sounds ridiculous, it is because it is.