Children’s Health Defense (CHD) today filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain documents related to the agency’s safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccines through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database.
The lawsuit alleges the CDC violated provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by failing to respond to CHD’s FOIA requests to provide key analysis of reports in the vaccine safety database and intra- and inter-agency communications about those reports. CHD submitted the FOIA requests in the summer of 2022.
The agency said the requested information would be forthcoming by December of last year, but the documents were never delivered. CHD is asking the court to compel the release of the requested documents in compliance with the FOIA. Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, explained the significance of the lawsuit to The Defender: “The CDC continues to ask the American public to believe that COVID shots are safe, without providing the evidence. Our lawsuit demands that the CDC give us hard data to back up its claim. No one should take vaccine safety on faith.”