Excerpt:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week withdrew its motion to dismiss a lawsuit involving Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to correspondence between NIH researchers and people who contacted the agency regarding their injuries from the COVID-19 vaccine.

CHD sued the NIH in April, alleging the agency violated the Freedom of Information Act by failing to deliver the requested documents nearly six months after the initial request and by withholding crucial information from the public.

NIH sought last month to have the lawsuit dismissed. But on Wednesday, the agency asked the court to allow it to withdraw its motion to dismiss the case, saying it “has determined that it will respond to Plaintiff’s FOIA request” and further requesting the court to extend its deadline for responding to the request and the legal complaint to August 4.

On Thursday, the judge granted NIH’s request.

The NIH’s about-face came after CHD filed an opposition to NIH’s motion to dismiss last week, which challenged the NIH’s claim that the FOIA request was “broad and vague” and that it did not “reasonably describe” the requested records.

CHD’s filing accused NIH of cherry-picking sections of the FOIA request in making its case for dismissal, and said the motion “ignores every fact that undercuts its arguments, as well as 25 pages of exhibits.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD acting general counsel, accused the NIH of “stonewalling” because the agency previously informed CHD it had adequate information to fulfill the request, but then never did so. Instead, it stopped responding to CHD’s communications and later in its court filings made “baseless claims” to try to get the case dismissed, Rosenberg said.

CHD’s opposition to NIH’s motion to dismiss argued that in fact, its FOIA request was quite specific. Through earlier back-and-forth communication with NIH, CHD had narrowed and specified its request and provided NIH with a list of 10 people whose communications should be searched and even provided a list of search terms to be used to locate the documents.

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