Maybe they should block access. But then the anti-vaccine people don’t say the government is hiding data. I would imagine the open access is about providing transparency. And if you’re going to pick and choose who gets the data, then you need to employ some sort of system to approve/deny it which I assume no one wants to deal with on either side. If anybody can request the data, than what’s the point other than making things more complicated, again requiring some sort of system to handle request. And presumably the information could just be republished elsewhere and given VAERS is being continuously updated, now you potentially have outdated information being passed around.No, just didn't get around to it last night.
I guess the question then should be why it is made freely available? I'm not saying it should be hidden, but perhaps only provided to those doing real research.
For most people it’s been historically been a very niche database a normal person would never pay attention to.
Like any clinical information, be it a database of raw data or clinical trials or studies, the information is only as good as it’s context. There’s plenty of peer reviewed, double blinded placebo controlled clinical trials freely available that are absolute garbage because of how the studies are designed. But that doesn’t mean they should be censored. To a large extent way our scientific system works is that the reader must be the judge of quality (though where studies are published are usually one way to help with that). Otherwise we get into arbiters of truth and things of that nature.