Can Substackers (Journalists) get FOIA processing fees waived?
A case study for missing VAERS reports. I FILED MY 1ST FOIA...!
Thank you to my team, you know who you are. A few days ago I filed my 1st FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request to the CDC for all the missing VAERS reports during the Covid-19 era. It basically constitutes ~30,000 reports (ID#’s) that have never been published and I have a dashboard for it here:
Here is templates to FOIA HHS or CDC for anybody interested:
I’ve posed the question to the creators of Substack about content creators being considered journalists as it pertains to FOIA and fee waivers. The chat with the creators and Team Substack happens every Thursday 10am PST:
In hindsight I should have submitted the proper URL link to my channel and I could have included the exact list of 30,175 reports I was referring to.
The most famous of all 30K report (ID#’s) that have never been published is explained in detail here.:
What Ever Happened To The DEAD 2yr Old Alaskan Baby VAERS Report That Was Never Published?
Here is the data aka report:
I guess I will follow-up with you all in early 2024 based on CDC’s time extension.
This process was much easier than I thought and I might go to town on them and beat the FOIA department into a state a reasonableness! Variable image/object printing and dbase is my specialty! Think of variable image printing like Toyota sending you stuff in the mail for your 4Runner, but the neighbor gets adverts in the mail for her Toyota Rav4 SUV. Like at Hunter Labs, we could send patient statements a little stork bird image in the corner if the patient was near or had a baby delivery. The guy with diabetes or cardio diagnostics done based on diagnosis would get a strong heart logo on their patient bill. That’s what I’m talking about, but I’m already getting way ahead of myself and everybody else as usual. God Bless
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Had some trouble with FOI's in the UK. Although they are free (amazing really), they fund you a max of 24hrs of worker pay to find your info. Overly broad requests are a massive problem and many fall foul. This is outside what you are asking for but it might be worth asking a bare minimum question in which the answer would give you an interesting lead? Don't know the charge from them though. Shame for this to not succeed in any way. Hope you find the data!
You're never going to see the data. I've been waiting 2+ years for mine. CDC amd FDA pass the requests back and forth for a few months, then tell you they can't run a db query, so your request will take 18 months as they look through the db BY HAND, and then they won't fulfill it even then. But it's good to make them go through the exercise of lying to you in PDFs.