Anthony Fauci Raised Miscarriage Danger in Private Texts While Telling Pregnant Women COVID Vaccine Was Safe

Dr Anthony Fauci privately flagged a theoretical link between the COVID-19 vaccine's second dose and first-trimester miscarriage in January 2021, even as public health agencies urged pregnant women to get vaccinated, citing safety data.

The text messages, pulled from Fauci's government-issued phone, were released on Monday, 10 August 2026, by Republican Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky. They form part of an ongoing congressional probe into the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director's handling of the pandemic. The exchange has reignited scrutiny over the timing of what officials knew about the vaccine's risk profile for pregnant women.

What Fauci, Walensky and Murthy Exchanged in January 2021

The messages, dated 25-26 January 2021, capture a three-way exchange between Fauci, then-CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky, and Dr Vivek Murthy, who would go on to serve as US Surgeon General under President Biden. The documents were obtained from Fauci's government cellphone, one of more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails handed over as part of the Senate investigation.

In the chain, Fauci wrote: 'I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.' Walensky responded in agreement with the concern Fauci raised.

The same exchange also contains context that has drawn less attention. Murthy later flagged a World Health Organisation recommendation advising against use of Moderna's vaccine in pregnant women, citing limited data. Fauci replied that officials had to weigh vaccination risks against COVID-19 infection risks. He noted more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated with no issues reported, and that FDA, CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' guidance all allowed pregnant women to choose vaccination. According to the text chain, Fauci also told Murthy there was 'no data or theoretical reason' to prefer earlier vaccination in pregnancy over later, and dismissed as a misconception the idea that mRNA vaccines could alter a person's genes.

Public Guidance Versus Private Caution

Weeks after the exchange, Fauci addressed the same subject publicly. In a televised interview on 3 February 2021, he said there were 'no red flags' associated with the vaccine for pregnant women. That framing continued through the year: by August 2021, the CDC's official public guidance stated that preliminary findings from its v-safe pregnancy registry suggested mRNA COVID-19 vaccination during early pregnancy did not increase miscarriage risk, guidance intended to inform conversations between doctors and patients.

Senator Johnson's office argues the gap between the private text and the eventual public messaging matters for informed consent, describing the released chain as material that 'could have an immediate impact [on] public health and the principle of informed consent.' The senators' release also questioned why only three of the phone's contacts were saved under names, with the rest identified only by number, among the full cache of 34,000 messages and 522 voicemails.

Why the 12.6% Miscarriage Statistic Was Contested

The CDC's central pregnancy safety data came from the v-safe registry, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2021. That report covered 35,691 v-safe participants who identified as pregnant, alongside the first 3,958 enrollees in the v-safe pregnancy registry. The authors acknowledged limitations in drawing conclusions about spontaneous abortion given the relatively small number of completed pregnancies studied, since most live births tracked involved third-trimester vaccination.

That limitation drew formal criticism. A letter published in NEJM in September 2021 argued the study's headline spontaneous-abortion rate of 12.6% was misleading. The reason: 700 of the 827 completed pregnancies in the sample had received their first vaccine dose in the third trimester, after the primary miscarriage risk window had passed. The critics said those participants should have been excluded from the risk calculation entirely.

The CDC later published a separate, more targeted analysis of participants vaccinated specifically before 20 weeks' gestation, refining the original figures. Independent reproductive health experts have noted that fever in early pregnancy is a known risk factor, but the COVID-19 vaccine's actual miscarriage data has not shown a population-level increase. No peer-reviewed national surveillance data published since has established a confirmed population-wide increase in miscarriage rates tied to COVID-19 vaccination.

The 2021 text messages show Fauci raising a theoretical concern grounded in the vaccine's known fever and inflammatory side effects, a caution that preceded, rather than contradicted, the broader safety data gathered over the following months.