PORTLAND, Ore — By now we are all pretty familiar with Oregon’s Vaccine Advisory Committee.
Their job was to make recommendations to the state about who should get the vaccine next.
The committee quietly wrapped things up this week. They had two meetings not open to the public or people in the press.
Carson wrote in and asked The Story with Dan Haggerty team: "So my question is who exactly is on this virus vaccine committee and why don't we know about what they're talking about like a transcript of their meetings?"
Up until this week, we did know what they were talking about. They streamed each meeting live, recorded it and sent out minutes. Then this week, they decided to stop doing that.
We sent a public records request to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) to try to get a copy of a Tuesday, Feb. 2 closed-door meeting.
OHA told us, "Because this was an evaluation/debriefing, there was no recording."
They also sent us a single page of bullet points on what was discussed in that meeting.
The committee met in private again Thursday, Feb. 4. KGW News asked to listen to the meeting and was turned down.
OHA said, "This is not a public meeting. It's an unofficial wrap-up... Because the VAC will not conduct any business and this is not a public meeting, we will not be recording, taking minutes or developing a transcript."
Typically, government agencies are required by law to hold public meetings.
"The law does have exemptions for certain kinds of recordings or records that are designed to protect privacy or operations of government that the legislature thought should remain secret. I'm not aware of a post-recommendation debriefing exemption to the public records law though," Willamette University Law Professor Paul Diller said.
And who exactly is on this committee? There are 27 members from different organizations. Those include people from county health departments, private health clinics, nonprofits and advocacy groups and groups representing communities of color.
One of the committee members, Musse Olol with the Somali American Council of Oregon, spoke with Dan Haggerty about whether the committee will make a real difference in vaccine distribution.
"We don't want to start something and just leave it there. As far as a success. Success will be ultimately when all Oregonians are cured and vaccinated. And COVID-19 is out the door. Until we get that I don't know that I can call anything in a success at this point," he said.