Newly released text messages from Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone are raising fresh questions about the difference between what senior health officials were discussing privately during the early days of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and what they were saying publicly.
Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky released one exchange they say could have an immediate impact on the public’s understanding of how vaccine safety concerns were handled.
The messages involve Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The discussion centered on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and pregnancy.
In a January 25-26, 2021 exchange, Fauci wrote that the second vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester” because of the fever and cytokine response that could follow vaccination.
That is not exactly a minor concern.
What makes the exchange especially noteworthy is what happened afterward. Fauci and other federal health officials continued publicly encouraging pregnant women to get vaccinated, repeatedly emphasizing that available evidence showed the vaccines were safe.
A little more than a week after the text exchange, Fauci appeared on the JAMA Network and addressed questions about vaccination during pregnancy.
“The FDA,” Fauci said, “has found, thus far — and we’ve got to be careful — but thus far, no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”
That wording now deserves another look.
If Fauci privately believed there was at least a theoretical possibility that the immune response caused by a second dose could contribute to miscarriage during the first trimester, it is fair to ask why that concern was not more clearly discussed in public at the time.
By August 2021, Fauci’s public language had become even more confident.
In an interview with What to Expect, he said tens of thousands of vaccinated pregnant women had been followed by the CDC and that there was “no indication whatsoever” of an increase in adverse outcomes compared with unvaccinated pregnant women.
He added that it was “pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated,” while also noting that spontaneous miscarriages occur even in pregnancies where no vaccine is involved.
The issue here is not whether every theoretical concern ultimately turns out to be real. Medicine is full of possibilities that are investigated and later ruled out. The larger question is whether officials were as candid with the public about those uncertainties as they were with one another behind closed doors.
Think about it in more ordinary terms.
Suppose your doctor prescribed you a medication and assured you there was no meaningful reason for concern. Later, you discovered that before giving you that reassurance, the doctor had privately discussed the possibility that the drug could cause the exact complication you were worried about.
Even if the doctor later obtained evidence showing the medication was safe, you would probably want to know why that original concern was never mentioned.
That is the trust issue these messages are likely to fuel.
Johnson discussed the exchange during an appearance on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” where he also criticized a pregnancy-safety study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Johnson argued that the way miscarriage data were presented was misleading because many of the women included in the study had received their vaccinations during the third trimester, when miscarriage — generally defined as pregnancy loss before 20 weeks — was no longer possible.
He claimed that recalculating the figures using only women vaccinated early enough in pregnancy to experience a miscarriage would produce a dramatically higher percentage.
That argument has become part of a much larger debate over how early vaccine-safety data were collected, interpreted, and communicated. But Johnson’s broader accusation is even more serious: He contends that Fauci understood there could be concerns about inflammatory responses during early pregnancy and withheld those concerns because officials feared contributing to vaccine hesitancy.
“All we heard from public officials was that this was perfectly safe for pregnancy,” Johnson said.
Whether the newly released messages ultimately support all of Johnson’s conclusions will undoubtedly be debated. But the texts themselves add another piece to a larger question that has followed the government’s pandemic response for years: How much uncertainty existed behind the scenes while officials were presenting far more confident messages to the public?
Fauci’s phone reportedly contains more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails. According to Johnson’s office, only three contacts were saved in the phone’s address book, leaving most of the remaining conversations connected only to unidentified phone numbers.