Tag: foia

FOIA Data Reveal Adverse Event Patterns in New RNA Dog Vaccine

Details from a FOIA request to the USDA have revealed severe adverse events following injection of the Nobivac NXT canine flu H3N2 vaccine, the first self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) vaccine widely used in the US for pets. The aftermarket reports received by The HighWire show the first 1,012 pages of 1,888 total pages of adverse events from September 2024 through July 2025. There were 296 cases involving the Nobivac RNA vaccine as a suspect product: 152 were adverse reactions, and 76 were listed as cases of lack of efficacy, meaning the dogs developed respiratory illness or cough after receiving the vaccine.

The dataset shows that there were four canine deaths and one feline death following vaccine administration, but two of the dog cases had significant confounding factors. The other two cases involve dogs that collapsed shortly after receiving the vaccination. In addition, three dogs were euthanized following the vaccine.

-41 cases involved neurological issues

-30 cases of anaphylaxis or hypersensitivity

-52 cases involved vomiting

-19 cases had an injection-site mass/lump/panniculitis/fibrosis/surgery

-26 cases of diarrhea

-5 cases of collapse/shock-type presentations

-4 cases of bloody diarrhea

A 4-year-old golden retriever collapsed 10 minutes after the vaccination, before going into complete cardiac arrest and dying. Merck added anaphylaxis to the report later. A 7-year-old Yorkshire Terrier collapsed 70 minutes after receiving the vaccine, and life-saving care was attempted, but the dog passed away. Diphenhydramine and dexamethasone sodium phosphate were given to the terrier because of previous unspecified vaccine reactions. In addition to the Nobivac flu shot, the 7.33-pound terrier received the Nobivac Canine 1-DAPPvL4 and Nobivac Intra-Trac3 vaccines.

An 8-year-old Shih Tzu was lethargic and vomiting shortly after receiving the vaccination. She was diagnosed with renal failure six days later and euthanized. The event narrative explains that she had received several vaccinations before, including non-Nobivac flu vaccines, but had never received the Nobivac NXT canine influenza vaccine, which is the first approved saRNA vaccine in the country. Merck evaluated this case and said the vaccine was unlikely to be the cause.

saRNA vaccines have limited long-term safety data, much as mRNA vaccines did before they were rolled out to the general public in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These vaccines are marketed as “innovative, adjuvant-free, non-live vaccines” by Merck.

The first vaccine of its kind was approved by the USDA in 2024 and received limited coverage, but Nicolas Hulscher, MPH of the McCullough Foundation, criticized the lack of safety testing and the manufacturer’s level of transparency.

“It appears that Merck is attempting to camouflage the fact that this product is self-amplifying,” Hulscher wrote. “The primary product description only indicates that it uses ‘revolutionary RNA particle technology.’ However, the novel platform works by RNA particles targeting dendritic cells, where they self-replicate and result in sustained antigen production.“

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How UK Regulator Ofcom Quietly Bypassed International Law to Police American Speech

A Freedom of Information response has confirmed what the UK’s speech regulator would probably have preferred to keep quiet. Ofcom fired off 197 information demands to American tech companies under the Online Safety Act, and not a single one went through the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, the formal diplomatic process that exists for exactly this kind of cross-border legal enforcement. Every one of those 197 notices was sent directly, by email or post, to companies operating entirely on American soil.

The number comes from a FOI request filed by Daniel Lü, who asked Ofcom a series of pointed questions about how it enforces the Online Safety Act against non-UK targets.

Ofcom confirmed that as of February 26, 2026, it had issued 197 Section 100 notices to US businesses. Zero through MLAT. The treaty between the US and UK that governs how one country’s legal process gets enforced in the other’s jurisdiction was treated as optional. Ofcom decided it didn’t apply.

That admission drew an immediate response from Preston Byrne, the American lawyer who represents 4chan and other US companies targeted by Ofcom.

Byrne called the 197 notices a “breathtaking” “attack on the First Amendment” and pointed out the uncomfortable math.

Only two US companies, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, have publicly refused to comply with Ofcom’s demands. If Byrne’s assessment is right, that leaves Ofcom enjoying “a 98% compliance rate with foreign censorship orders that violate the First Amendment.”

A British regulator sent nearly 200 demands to American companies, bypassed every established legal channel, and almost all of them appear to have simply done what they were told. The chilling effect is already here.

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The FBI’s FOIA Blacklist

The Freedom of Information Act was designed to empower citizens to hold their government accountable. But evidence suggests the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has quietly adopted a practice that turns that principle on its head: labeling some of the people who file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as “vexsome.”

In effect, the agency has created a FOIA-specific blacklist. Yet when asked, it denies having done so.

The FBI has maintained what it calls a list of “vexsome” FOIA filers for years. The label itself is odd — the proper term would be “vexatious” — but the implication is clear enough. Certain individuals and organizations who file frequent records requests are flagged internally as troublesome.

That practice is deeply at odds with the very text of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exists because the late Representative John Moss (D-CA) spent 10 years encountering delays, evasions, and outright refusals by federal agencies and departments to give him information he needed for oversight purposes. Moss understood that many citizens and watchdog groups asked the same kind of persistent questions of executive branch officials as he did, but they lacked a statutory basis to force such information disclosures. It’s why Moss worked so hard to get FOIA into law. Investigative journalists, transparency organizations and researchers often file dozens — sometimes hundreds — of requests in pursuit of public records. The law anticipates and protects that behavior.

There is nothing in the FOIA statute authorizing federal agencies to maintain lists of “vexatious” requesters or to single out particular citizens for special scrutiny because they use the law frequently. The statute’s presumption is exactly the opposite: that access to government records belongs to the public, and that agencies must justify withholding them.

Yet internal records obtained through FOIA requests by transparency researcher John Greenewald, who runs the document archive The Black Vault, show that the FBI has indeed categorized certain requesters in this way.

The Cato Institute learned this firsthand when the FBI labeled it a “vexsome” FOIA requester during the previous administration. More recently, when I filed a FOIA request seeking records explaining how the FBI defines or uses that designation, the Bureau responded that it could find no records responsive to the request — even though records labeling individuals or groups as “vexsome” were previously available to Greenewald.

The FBI cannot both maintain a category of “vexatious” requesters and simultaneously claim no records exist describing how that category is used. That’s why Cato has filed a new FOIA lawsuit to force the FBI to produce the records at issue.

The deeper problem is what such labeling represents. FOIA was enacted in 1966 to prevent federal agencies from deciding which members of the public deserve access to government information. Congress deliberately structured the law so that requests are judged by their legal merits — not by who submits them or how often they do so. Indeed, the statute has been updated multiple times over the past 60 years in response to agency or department tactics designed to evade the statutes’ very purpose.

Once agencies begin categorizing requesters as nuisances or troublemakers, they create a de facto enemies list composed of the very taxpayers and citizens they are sworn to serve. A system meant to promote transparency risks becoming one in which the government quietly tracks and stigmatizes those who seek to hold it accountable for its conduct — or misconduct.

Agency and department heads routinely claim that FOIA is administratively burdensome — yet they never ask Congress for line-item appropriations to ensure processing is quick and efficient. Agencies process hundreds of thousands of requests each year — and in tens of thousands of cases invoke one or more of FOIA’s nine exemptions to keep information secret that in most cases should never have been withheld in the first place. Those tactics alone force requesters to retain lawyers capable of litigating through the delays, obfuscations, and denials. The FBI’s “vexsome FOIA filer” program takes this bureaucratic game to a whole new level.

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NASA Partially Lifts Redactions in James Webb Briefing Records Following Appeal

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case involving congressional briefings on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has yielded additional records following a successful appeal, but the newly released material continues to be heavily redacted, leaving key portions of the briefing content concealed.

The case, labeled as 25-00860-F-HQ, stems from a September 22, 2024, FOIA request seeking “all briefings about the James Webb telescope and program, made for Congress,” including both classified and unclassified material related to discoveries made by the observatory. The request was originally denied with a “no records” determination, a conclusion later overturned on appeal.

As previously reported, NASA ultimately acknowledged that responsive records did exist and released a set of briefing slides in August 2025. However, those materials were almost entirely redacted under FOIA Exemption (b)(5), which protects pre-decisional and deliberative communications within government agencies.

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Emails show Fauci, Collins plotting to circumvent ‘impressive’ data for COVID natural immunity

The Biden administration grappled with research suggesting natural immunity was more effective than COVID-19 vaccination shortly before federal vaccine mandates in 2021, admitting the rigor of the massive Israeli study and worrying it might undermine its promotion of one-size-fits-all vaccination, newly released emails show.

The Freedom of Information Act production to Protect the Public’s Trust, shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, gives the most compelling evidence to date that federal officials knew their pending mandates were scientifically shaky yet repeatedly asserted in public – misrepresenting federal research – that natural immunity couldn’t match vaccine-acquired immunity.

The emails add heft to prior claims by a now-former Food and Drug Administration adviser, going back four years, that the feds ultimately rejected natural immunity as an exemption to vaccine mandates for bureaucratic reasons and kept pushing vaccines on all ages and conditions for the sake of simpler messaging, not science.

They also reaffirm the glaring lack of rigorous research by U.S. institutions on basic questions about SARS-CoV-2 and treatment outcomes, with many of the most important findings coming from abroad. The abnormally high risk of heart inflammation in young people post-vaccination, for example, emerged from Israeli data and institutions.

It’s just “more evidence that the public health bureaucracy was ripe for a thorough housecleaning,” Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told DCNF, blasting officials for trying to “bury what didn’t fit their preferred narrative” and Americans’ reliance on “Israeli research for their health information” despite billions in federal funding.

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Here are the names of the neo-Nazis who rallied at a Little Rock civil rights site on Saturday

By now, you’ve probably already heard the news that a group of neo-Nazis rallied and marched in front of the Arkansas Capitol and Little Rock Central High School this past Saturday before climbing into the back of a U-Haul box truck that was later stopped by police.

News of the incident has gone viral, with a video from Al Jazeera English being shared over 16,000 times on Instagram. 

The group calls itself Blood Tribe and was founded in 2022 by former United States Marine and tattoo artist Christopher Pohlhaus. The group, dressed in red and black, carry flags with swastikas and chant white supremacist slogans as they disrupt pro-LGBTQ+ events and rally in different states. The group helped spread the racist rumor that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, before the 2024 election. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Blood Tribe as a white supremacist group that is unabashed about its admiration of Adolf Hitler.

Now we know the identities of 22 of the 23 men in the truck, one of whom is Pohlhaus. All but one of them are from out of state. On Thursday, the Little Rock Police Department released incident reports and bodycam footage related to last weekend’s incident in response to a request under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. 

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DARPA’s Secret 60-Day Pandemic Pipeline: FOIA Documents Reveal U.S. Military Program to Synthesize Viruses From Digital Sequences and Mass-Produce mRNA Countermeasures

This report examines an October 2025 FOIA release from U.S. Right to Know regarding DARPA’s “Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3)” Research Description Document (RDD) from Duke University, Revision 3 (January 2020)—a program that was already operational before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

DARPA’s own words paint the clearest picture yet of a fully integrated pre-COVID pandemic U.S. military system that can:

  • take only a digital sequence of a virus
  • synthesize an infectious clone
  • grow it in a “Thaw-and-Infect” panel of human and animal cell lines
  • isolate antibodies from infected blood
  • evolve those antibodies using computational mutation engines
  • encode those antibodies into modified mRNA
  • package them in lipid nanoparticles
  • and produce 20,000 doses within 60 days

The program is open about building a platform that works even when no physical virus exists, only a computer file.

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School District Stymies Transparency By Demanding Six Figures to Provide Anti-Kirk Teacher’s Curriculum

Benjamin Fillo, a teacher at Barrington High School in Rhode Island, came under fire for disturbing comments he made following the political assassination of conservative leader and icon Charlie Kirk.

The school district is now making it difficult for parents to access Fillo’s curriculum through a FOIA request by demanding a six-figure fee to provide the information.

Just the News reports:

Rhode Island’s Barrington Public Schools demanded six figures just to turn over one social studies teacher’s curriculum in response to Access to Public Records Act requests to discern whether Benjamin Fillo’s classroom lessons reflected the viewpoints in his once-public TikTok video that said the “piece of garbage” Kirk got what he deserved.

The district separately estimated that producing Fillo’s roughly 2,200 work emails going back to 2016 that include the word “Trump,” the other APRA request, would cost about $1,100.

*******

In correspondence shared with Just the News, the district blamed the now-$116,000 estimate on the scope of what Solas requested, Fillo’s curriculum for his full 15 years, and offered $5,500 if Solas would narrow her request to the past five years. To justify its estimate for Fillo’s emails, it cited an opinion by a recurring Solas foe, state Attorney General Peter Neronha.

During Fillo’s unhinged remarks in a video shared on social media, he called Kirk a “piece of garbage” and stated, “I have about as much sympathy for Charlie Kirk right now as I do for all those farmers across the country who want socialist handouts from the government right now.”

“This is a man who hated the LGBTQ community, who hated women’s rights, who hated democracy.”

“Who thought that he was a big man cause he went to college campuses, debated young college students and thought he proved how tough he was with his words that he studied ahead of time.”

“What a piece of garbage. This is what happens,” he said before smugly adding, “Bye, Charlie!”

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Judicial Watch Sues CIA for Jeffrey Epstein Records

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for records involving any role Jeffrey Epstein might have played in connection with the agency, his business dealings, travel, victim or witness information, and records concerning his death (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:25-cv-03618)).

Judicial Watch filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the CIA failed to respond to a July 9, 2025, FOIA request for:

  • Intelligence activities and connections, including any records indicating whether Epstein was ever an asset for any U.S. or foreign intelligence agency and/or reports analyzing his potential connections to foreign intelligence services.
  • Financial and business activities, including analyses concerning Epstein’s wealth accumulation, estimated at approximately $560 million at the time of his 2019 arrest.
  • Associations and networks, including records documenting Epstein’s interactions with high-profile executives, royalty, or other prominent figures, where such interactions were of interest to the CIA due to national security concerns. Also, records about his so-called “Black Book” or contact lists, as well as his properties that may have been referenced in CIA reports.
  • Criminal investigations and legal proceedings, including records about coordination with other federal agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Justice (DOJ), or U.S. Marshals Service, regarding Epstein’s criminal activities. Also, records about his death in 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.
  • Surveillance and evidence collection.
  • Foreign connections and travel.
  • Victim and witness information.

 In May 2023, Epstein was reported to have met “dozens of times” with former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak between 2013-2017. Epstein reportedly donated $110,000 to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wife’s online poetry project in 2016 and held meetings with many other high profile individuals “long after he was a registered sex offender. He had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.”

Attorney General Pamela Bondi released a long-awaitedtrove of documents related to Epstein in February 2025, but “the much-hyped, roughly 200-page document dump provided no big revelations, instead listing celebrities and politicians who were already known to have palled around with the notorious pedophile.”

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Legal watchdog asks U.S. whistleblower agency to probe hiding evidence on infamous Steele Dossier

Alegal watchdog is asking the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the government’s main whistleblower protection agency, to investigate whether several federal agencies “fraudulently concealed” responsive documents about the Steele Dossier at the heart of the now-discredited Russia collusion probe. 

The concealment is related to a Freedom of Information case brought by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, which first represented Just the News in seeking the Steele dossier documents years ago, made the dramatic legal request this weekend after documents declassified recently by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unmasked a secret effort to thwart the release of evidence under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

A concerted effort to hide Steele Dossier records from press and public

“Southeastern Legal Foundation is committed to ensuring governmental integrity and exposing government corruption,” the group wrote Acting Special Counsel Jameison Greer in a letter dated Friday. “SLF therefore asks OSC, upon a finding of arbitrary and capricious withholding of responsive documents, to report violations of the law to the President and the Attorney General for appropriate action.”

The group said documents and reports recently released by Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe unmasked a concerted effort to hide evidence about problems with the Steele Dossier, including from the FOIA request filed by Southeastern Legal Foundation on behalf of Just the News.

“Based on Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard’s and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) John Ratcliffe’s bombshell 2025 reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) fraudulently concealed documents responsive to Southeastern Legal Foundation’s 2019 FOIA requests for communications about the now-infamous Clinton-funded Steele Dossier,” the group alleged.

“SLF therefore asks OSC to investigate the Intelligence Community’s (IC) and their principals’ improper withholding of these documents,” it added. 

You can read the full letter here.

File

20251010 SLF Ltr. to OSC re. Request for Investigation (FINAL) w Appx.pdf

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