Wood House 76

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Documenting outstanding FOI submissions and requests for status updates.

For background, see University of Oxford denies request to release emails related to Prof Sunetra Gupta’s visit to the United States in October 2020 and The Probable COVID Deaths: Attempting to get the New York City Health Department to show what they did and how they did it with thousands of deaths reported in spring 2020.

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University of Oxford

In response to Oxford’s denial (detailed here), I sent two emails:

On 8 November 2025, I said I would request a review but that I was first interested in knowing if the University’s response would be the same if I amended the request to ask only for the emails sent to Dr. Gupta under the parameters I articulated, rather than any from her to recipients. FOI Oxford replied (see below) on 11 November. I received no further reply, even after requesting a status update.

On 12 November 2025, I sent a request for review in the same email thread:

This request has also gone unanswered as of today.

The processing of my requests may be affected by the school term calendar and breaks/vacations.

UPDATE, 12 Feb 2026: No response from Oxford to any of my attempts to check the status of my request or request for review.

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NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Two FOI requests submitted to NYC DOH are overdue.

1. A request for data and records related to “probable COVID deaths,” submitted on 28 August 2025 and projected by NYC DOH to receive a response by 14 November 2025:
   • Dates of death for deaths originally counted as “probable COVID deaths” in 2020. See page 66 of vital statistics report: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/vs/2020sum.pdf – i.e., the 5,405 deaths, 2,017 of which appear to have been counted in the finalized numbers as COVID-19 deaths under ICD-10 guidelines and the remaining 3,338 Other deaths
   • Records explaining the definitions for each column in this DOHMH GitHub, ie., confirmed, probable and incomplete. https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/archive/probable-confirmed-dod.csv The data run only through Nov 11, 2020, the last update was 13 December 2020, and entries in the “incomplete” column total 7,000. [Graph and table attached to email; see here for details]
   • Records explaining where the 7,000 “Incompletes” in the “incomplete” column in the file above went in the final Vital Statistics report for 2020, submitted on 8 October 2025.
2. A request for a) deaths that occurred daily in NYC irrespective of residency 1999-2024, b) daily deaths of NYC residents only, 1999-2024, and c) live births occurring daily in NYC, 1999-2024. I’ve previously obtained these datasets from NYCDOH, through 2021, and seek the same data for 2022-2024.

NYC DOH has not replied to my recent request for status updates.

DOH replied on 23 December 2025 with an apology for the delay and said I will receive a response on both requests by 16 January 2025.

UPDATE 12 Feb 2026: I received records. With those related to “the probables”, I had to file an appeal after being denied.

New York City department of health denies my request for records that show what it did with “probable” COVID deaths in 2020; I have filed an appeal [UPDATE 27 Jan 2026 – Appeal granted, data released]

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