[daddylongstroke]

I believe the FDA is already mandated by law to release this data, which is why the original lawsuit was filed.

From a Reuters article on it: They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine."

So it really sounds like this is just part of the course of making sausage of approval. You have someone already embedded in the licensure project/process where this is all (very likely largely automagically) handled as it is always expected to be released to the public.

[Uberphallus]

Yeah, but this scale of documentation production is unprecedented.

A lot of cash was dumped into fast and extensive R&D, trials and production scaling because of the urgency of the situation, and along comes an insane documentation backlog.

To put in perspective, the original HPV vaccine R&D and trial spanned over 7 years with 25,000 patients (of which only 20,000 women), and assuming the documentation was provided to the FDA as it was produced, it could be FOIA'd relatively quickly.

Pfizer/BioNTech did the same, with almost double the patients, in just over 6 months.