Clearly, niceties like medical privacy are completely irrelevant when it comes to COVID vaccination. Government already went there and a thousand miles beyond so who cares. Replace the names with numbers and call ita day The consequences of bad things being hidden in this data are drastically higher than a few people being deanonymized.

Eh, I'm not sure I agree with that[0], but even if I did, the government skirting (what you think is) the law once certainly should not be a reason for it to do so again in the future. As it stands, they are legally required to redact PII.

If someone actually wants to understand how/why the vaccine was approved, the most sensible option IMO would be to tailor the FOIA Request more narrowly. Request the summary section: it should lay out the rationale, without diving into specific details that might need redaction. The only other alternatives I see are lobbying congress to either a) allocate more money for FOIA or b) make some categories/documents releasable as-is.

OTOH, asking for a third of a million pages--many of which no one has real intention of reading--does seem like a good publicity stunt.

[0] If participating in a clinical trial gets (potentially embarrassing) personal details leaked, we won't have nearly as many volunteers next time.