In December 2021, ICAN announced that it was suing to obtain data from v-safe, the new smartphone-based program that the CDC deployed to track adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.
According to the CDC, v-safe allows users to “quickly and easily share with CDC how you, or your dependent, feel after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.” As we shared before, the data from v-safe is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” a private technology company, in the form of “aggregate deidentified data,” meaning it does not contain personal health information. This means the data could be shared with the public, just as it is shared with Oracle.
As part of ICAN’s steadfast commitment to hold the CDC to its promise of providing “timely and transparent information about the safety of vaccines to … the public,” ICAN, through its attorneys, headed by Aaron Siri, submitted legal demands for the v-safe data – specifically demanding, “All de-identified data submitted to v-safe since January 1, 2020.”
Despite the CDC’s ability to immediately release this deidentified data pursuant to its own protocol, the CDC took the position that “the information in the app is not de-identified” and so it would not produce it. Thus, in December 2021, ICAN sued. ICAN also submitted an additional request to address the agency’s objection, demanding, “All data submitted to v-safe since January 1, 2020,” and when the CDC still refused to release the data, ICAN sued again.
Now, after months of litigation, the court has ordered that, by September 30, 2022, the CDC must produce the first batch of over 19 months’ worth of data collected from tens of millions of v-safe participants between December 14, 2020 and July 31, 2022!
This is a huge win for ICAN and for the American public, who will finally start to be able to see for themselves the actual self-reported nationwide data about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.