Months Before Officials Told Pregnant Women the COVID Shot Was Safe, Fauci Privately Flagged a Theoretical First-Trimester Miscarriage Risk

Every outbreak runs on a currency more fragile than any vaccine: whether the public believes the people giving the orders believe them too. A pregnant woman deciding on a shot is weighing a question she can’t independently check, whether the confidence on television matches the official’s private read of the evidence. For one January 2021 exchange, we can finally check.

On August 10, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first messages recovered from Anthony Fauci’s government iPhone, a device the Department of Health and Human Services produced to their Senate subcommittee. The phone holds more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails, and the senators led with a single chain, dated January 25 and 26, 2021, among Fauci, then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky, and surgeon general nominee Vivek Murthy. In it, Fauci writes that a “second dose of covid vaccine theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

Read the sentence for what it is. It is not proof the vaccine caused miscarriages, and Fauci framed it as theoretical, tied to the strong cytokine response many people mounted after the second dose, the same immune surge that left arms sore and bodies feverish. Murthy, for his part, asked whether officials had seen bad outcomes in pregnant women already vaccinated and whether earlier or later in pregnancy was the safer window; Fauci answered that there were no data or theoretical reason to prefer one over the other. This is what honest scientific uncertainty looks like in private: careful people flagging a plausible first-trimester risk to one another, because a sharp immune reaction early in pregnancy is exactly the kind of thing a careful scientist flags. The problem is not that the concern existed. It is what happened to it after the group chat closed.

It did not travel. By that summer the federal message to pregnant women ran in the opposite direction of Fauci’s private caveat. In July 2021 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the maternal-fetal medicine society recommended COVID vaccination for pregnant individuals at any point in pregnancy, and the CDC followed in August, citing an analysis it said showed no increased risk of miscarriage. No public first-trimester asterisk. No note that one of the government’s own had flagged this in January. The single most sensitive population in the entire campaign was handed the least uncertainty.

Anyone outside the building who raised the same first-trimester question found a colder reception. The public messaging of 2021 treated vaccine safety in pregnancy as a settled matter and the people still asking as a problem to be managed, even as the government’s own experts were putting the identical question to each other in private. The absurdity of that gap is what Vinay Prasad, the oncologist who later ran the FDA’s biologics center, reached for days before these texts surfaced, in a satirical open letter imagining the confession Fauci owes the country, one in which he admits he doubted in private what he sold in public. It read as satire until the real record started arriving and began to look like a rough draft.

We have seen this shape before. The gap between the private record and the public message is not new to this pandemic; it surfaces in every one, usually years later, usually through a subpoena. In June 2024, testifying before the House, Fauci conceded that the six-foot distancing rule that shuttered schools and businesses was not built on data he was aware of and “sort of just appeared.” House Oversight Republicans separately released emails they say show his former senior adviser David Morens deleting federal COVID records and coaching EcoHealth Alliance on how to route around oversight, the group whose Wuhan coronavirus work sits at the center of the origins fight. The direction is consistent: certainty projected outward while the doubt stayed inside the group.

There is a reason this is surfacing through senators and an iPhone rather than a courtroom. In his final days in office in January 2025, President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon covering any federal offense from 2014 through 2025, a blanket shield handed out before any charge existed. When Fauci appeared before the Senate late this July, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer more than 100 questions; the committee voted along party lines to hold him in contempt, and Rand Paul referred that decision to the Justice Department. Federal prosecution for his pandemic-era conduct is foreclosed by the pardon, and he will not answer under oath. The record is the accountability that is left, which is why the contents of that phone carry more weight than any hearing gavel.

None of this turns a theoretical private warning into proven harm, and honest reporting will not pretend the January text settles a safety question Fauci himself called theoretical. What it settles is narrower and more damaging. The government held its own uncertainty back from the exact people who most needed to weigh it, and then spent two years treating their questions as a threat rather than a fair thing to ask. Public health spends that kind of trust once. What to watch now is not another hearing but the next release from the phone, and whether HHS puts the underlying data behind its 2021 pregnancy recommendation on the table or litigates to keep it off. Message by message, the device is doing the testifying its owner won’t.

Sources

1. U.S. Senator Ron Johnson – Senators Johnson, Paul Release Initial Texts from Dr. Fauci’s Government iPhone (Aug 10, 2026)
2. CNN Politics – Republican senators release Fauci’s text messages discussing safety of Covid vaccine and pregnancy (Aug 11, 2026)
3. ACOG – ACOG and SMFM Recommend COVID-19 Vaccination for Pregnant Individuals (July 2021)
4. Poynter – Did Fauci say he “made up” COVID-19 rules on social distancing? A look at the transcript (June 2024 hearing)
5. House Oversight Committee – New emails show deliberate obstruction by top Fauci adviser David Morens
6. STAT – Anthony Fauci gets Biden preemptive pardon over pandemic role (Jan 2025)
7. PBS NewsHour – Why was Fauci held in contempt for pleading the Fifth, and what happens next
8. Sensible Medicine – Vinay Prasad, “What Anthony Fauci Should Say to the American People” (Aug 9, 2026)
9. STAT – FDA’s Vinay Prasad, controversial CBER chief, to depart (context on the author)