Publisher’s Platform: Redactions and the move towards radical transparency

For over thirty years, I have been beating the same drum, and the last few days were no exception (some argue a bit too loudly and self-serving). 

I have been posting about public health officials — and the FDA — sending out outbreak documents with the names of companies, growers, processors, and retailers blacked out behind gray boxes I do not think belong there. My position has not changed in three decades: most of those redactions should never have been made in the first place. Not surprisingly, my readers wrote back.

I welcome the pushback. Some of it is thoughtful. A little of it I even agree with. So rather than let the arguments for secrecy sit unanswered in my inbox, let me put them all on the table — every justification for non-disclosure I have heard over the years — and tell you exactly what I think of each.

“There is no written policy, but it is the way we have done things for years.”

I keep hearing my mother’s voice: “just because so-and-so does it does not mean you should too.” A practice is not a policy, and “we have always done it this way” is not a reason — it is the absence of one. Like all government habits (and, frankly, like neckwear), change is good.

“The outbreak is over, so there is no immediate public health threat.”

Frankly, that is true in most foodborne illness outbreaks. In nearly every outbreak I have ever seen, the source is figured out long after the peak of illnesses has passed. But that misses the point of disclosure. Telling the public who grew, processed, and sold the contaminated food is not only about stopping today’s outbreak — it is about giving consumers a track record, so they can see which companies have a strong food safety record and which keep turning up in the same sad story.

“Naming the company jeopardizes its cooperation in this and future outbreaks.”

If a company will cooperate only in exchange for a spot in the witness protection program and a promise of permanent anonymity, that tells you everything you need to know about its commitment — and our government’s commitment — to safe food. Cooperation purchased with secrecy is not cooperation. It is a hostage negotiation in which the public never gets a seat at the table.

“Bad publicity may cause economic hardship for the company.”

True. But here is a better business practice than avoiding bad press: not poisoning your customers. The economic hardship of an outbreak belongs to the company that caused it — not to the consumers left guessing.

“The source was an unknown supplier, so naming the point of service unfairly blames that business.”

This one actually makes some sense, and I will give it its due. But ask the obvious follow-up questions. Is this the first time this restaurant or retailer was burned by a faulty supplier, or is it a pattern? And even if it is the first time, is some of that unnamed product still sitting on shelves or in walk-in coolers somewhere? Fairness to the point of service cannot come at the expense of the people it serves.

“The product is perishable, so by the time we announce, it has already been eaten.”

I have heard this one a “bunch” of times, especially in leafy green outbreaks, and it is the one I find most cynical. Yes, the romaine is long gone. But why should the public be left in the dark about the kind of product that sickened people, and about the grower and shipper behind it, when that is precisely the information they need to decide who to buy from next time? “It’s already been eaten” is a reason to disclose, not a reason to hide.

“Going public with the point of service before the investigation is complete compromises the epidemiology.”

I completely agree with this one. This is the hard call — the one I suspect causes public health officials the most genuine angst. They are balancing the need to have enough data to go public and protect people against the risk of pointing the finger too soon. We have all lived through “it’s the tomatoes — no, wait, it’s the peppers.” The answer is not to stay silent forever. The answer is simple: do not go forward until the investigation is complete. Then go forward and go forward fully.

“We are afraid of making an investigation mistake — the tomatoes-then-peppers problem.”

This is exactly why the law gives public health officials immunity from liability for the good-faith decisions they make to protect the public. The system already accounts for honest error. Fear of an honest mistake is not a license for permanent silence.

“Surveillance is underfunded, and there simply are not the resources to finish investigations.”

There is no question this is true, and it is the argument that worries me most — because it is not really an argument for secrecy at all. It is a confession. I have watched investigations get dropped over the last few years. Labs that are not doing the genetic fingerprinting that links sick people to a common source. Tracebacks that stall out for lack of the people needed to find the root cause. That is a scandal in its own right, and the answer is to fund the work — not to redact our way out of admitting it is not getting done.

And now let me say the part the FDA never will. We do not have to guess whether transparency would cause the sky to fall, because we have already run the experiment. For the better part of twenty years, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has named the manufacturers of contaminated meat — and, since 2008, the retailers who sold it. The trade secrets of the beef and poultry industries did not collapse. Consumer confidence went up, not down. Chicken Little, the sky did not fall.

The FDA, which oversees roughly eighty percent of the food supply, could have learned that lesson from its sister agency two decades ago. Instead, it still hides behind “confidential commercial information.” And the line is not hard to draw. Formulations, ingredients, and how a product is made — those are trade secrets. Who supplied the tainted raw material, who made the tainted product, and where the tainted product was sold are not, especially during an outbreak. The most egregious example I know of remains the 2017 outbreak tied to I.M. Healthy soy nut butter — a great name for a product carrying a pathogen — which sickened dozens, some of them children, seriously. A recall was announced. No retailers were named. The company went bankrupt and was in no position to help. The public was left to fend for itself.

I have just watched the same instinct play out again. In the fall of 2024, a multistate E. coli O157:H7 outbreak tied to romaine lettuce hospitalized dozens, sent children into kidney failure, and killed someone. The FDA logged a few lines in a table, closed the file, and never issued the named, complete public notice it had issued for every comparable romaine outbreak before it. The processor and the grower sat behind gray boxes while they were free to tell anyone who asked that the evidence did not point to them. It did. The records said so, by name — once someone bothered to make the agency take the boxes off.

So where does that leave me, after over thirty years and more redacted documents than I care to count? Right where I started. Strip away the budget excuses, the cooperation worries, and the trade-secret theater, and you are left with a single question: who gets to decide what the public is allowed to know about the food that can kill them?

For me, the answer is easy. The public has a right to know, and to use that information however it sees fit. And people — especially government employees — have no business deciding for the rest of us what we should and should not be allowed to find out.