It was the FDA that wanted to keep them confidential for 75 years. That’s how the lawyers won the FOIA lawsuit to get them released. As well they should have. We should demand transparency from our government.
After seeing the utter mess Naomi Wolfe (who has long been infamous for her sloppy resesrch) and her “crowdsourced project” have made out of their clumsy and ignorant attempts to analyse and report on what has so far been released, it’s tempting to see the point of the FDA’s desire to keep them sealed. But I don’t think that washes. At all. Again, because of the need for transparency.
The FDA should have done due diligence and released their own analyses, conclusions and reports in the first tranche, so that professionals in the field, as well as these amateurs, could check them against the raw documents as they came out and conclude for themselves whether the FDA got it right or not.
(It was the FDA that wanted to keep them confidential for 75 years)
Figures