Nine days before Anthony Fauci went on camera and told the country there were “no red flags” about COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women, he sent a private text message warning that the second dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” That text, sent on a government-issued cellphone to two of the nation’s top health officials, sat hidden for more than four years, until Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released it this week as part of a widening Senate investigation.
The gap between what Fauci said in private and what he told the public is not a matter of interpretation. The dates, the words, and the audience are all on the record. And the women who trusted those public assurances, who rolled up their sleeves during the first trimester of pregnancy because the government told them it was safe, had no idea their own health officials harbored concerns they never shared.
The conversation took place January 25, 26, 2021, between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The texts were recovered from Fauci’s government iPhone, which the Senate Homeland Security Committee obtained as part of its oversight work. Johnson and Paul’s offices are now reviewing more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails stored on the device.
Fauci’s key message was blunt:
“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 second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
A cytokine storm, as defined by the Cleveland Clinic, is a severe complication of certain infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. Fauci was telling his colleagues that the immune response triggered by the second COVID shot could, in theory, pose a specific danger to women early in pregnancy.
Murthy’s response was immediate and telling. He called Fauci’s point about the cytokine storm after the second dose “really good” and flagged a separate concern: a World Health Organization announcement advising against pregnant women taking the vaccine. Murthy described the WHO’s statement as “strong” and “potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women.”
Walensky, for her part, agreed the issue mattered. She texted that it was “definitely a good post, esp after dose two,” and offered to flag the concern at an upcoming ACIP meeting the following day.
On February 3, 2021, barely a week after that text exchange, Fauci appeared publicly and struck a very different tone. As the New York Post reported, Fauci stated during a JAMA livestream that the FDA had “found thus far and we have to be careful but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”
No mention of the cytokine storm. No mention of the theoretical miscarriage risk. No mention of the WHO’s warning. Just a clean bill of health for a vaccine that had never been tested on pregnant women in clinical trials.
By August 30, 2021, Fauci had gone further. He told the public that “10s and 10s and 10s of thousands of women” had been followed by the CDC after vaccination during pregnancy, and there was “no indication whatsoever that there’s any increase of any adverse issues in a pregnant woman who was vaccinated compared to a pregnant woman who wasn’t vaccinated.” His conclusion was categorical: “It’s pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated.”
This pattern, of acknowledging risk in private while projecting certainty in public, is not new territory for Fauci. A CIA whistleblower previously told the Senate that Fauci deliberately steered intelligence agencies away from the lab-leak conclusion about the origins of COVID-19, another case where his private conduct diverged sharply from the public narrative he promoted.
Fauci was not alone. Murthy admitted in the text chain that he had been telling pregnant women there “hasn’t been evidence of concerning adverse outcomes in the trials,” while acknowledging that the number of pregnant subjects in those trials was “likely” limited. That is a careful way of saying the data didn’t exist, not that the data was reassuring.
Yet more than a year after that private conversation, Murthy went public with an even stronger message. He told pregnant women that data showed vaccines were “safe during these various stages before and during pregnancy,” adding: “It’s all the more important for you to get vaccinated if you are pregnant or if you are trying to become pregnant.”
Walensky’s CDC went further still. By September 2021, the agency issued a formal public statement declaring: “CDC strongly recommends COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks.”
The Washington Examiner noted that Johnson’s office characterized the released texts as having “an immediate impact on public health and the principle of informed consent.” That phrase, informed consent, sits at the heart of the matter. Women were told the vaccines were safe. They were not told that the officials making that recommendation had privately discussed a theoretical mechanism by which the vaccine could cause them to lose a pregnancy.
Fauci’s own texts reveal the tension he was navigating. He acknowledged that pregnant women were not included in the vaccine trials. He noted that “even female health care professionals” were “concerned about injecting a ‘genetic’ vaccine very early in pregnancy.” He attributed that concern to a “misperception” that mRNA can “get into your genes,” and added: “When the misperception gets extend to an early developing fetus, the anxiety heightens.”
But dismissing public concern as a “misperception” is one thing. Withholding your own stated concern about a specific, plausible biological mechanism, cytokine storm triggering miscarriage, is something else entirely.
Fauci also texted that the FDA, ACIP, and ACOG were “all permissive for pregnant women to have a choice,” and that animal toxicology studies “did not raise any red flags.” He cited a figure of more than 100,000 pregnant women vaccinated following the Emergency Use Authorization, claiming “no issues have arisen.”
Those reassurances may have been accurate as far as they went. But the public never heard the other side of the ledger, the side Fauci shared only with Walensky and Murthy. A woman weighing whether to get the shot in her first trimester deserved to know that the man running the nation’s COVID response had privately flagged a theoretical miscarriage risk. She never got that chance.
The broader pattern of evasion has only deepened questions about Fauci’s willingness to be forthcoming under scrutiny. When called before the Senate, a Senate panel voted to hold him in contempt after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times.
Johnson and Paul released only the first batch, 11 messages from a trove of more than 34,000 texts. Johnson’s phone also contains 522 voicemails, and only three formal contact names are stored on the device. The senators and their staff are still working through the contents and say they cannot yet determine whether any data has been deleted.
Johnson signaled that the investigation is far from over:
“While I’ve been conducting oversight for years, now that we have the documents and Fauci’s government-issued phone, my investigation has only just begun.”
As Fox News reported, the release has already drawn sharp responses. Sen. Rand Paul said Fauci “was saying one thing in public and something completely different in private.” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier asked bluntly: “Pregnant women were told it was safe! How many women lost babies due to Dr. Fauci’s lies?”
That question cannot be answered from a text chain alone. But it is the right question to ask. And the fact that it took a Senate investigation, a seized government phone, and more than four years to surface a nine-day-old contradiction between Fauci’s private warnings and public assurances tells you everything about how accountability works, or doesn’t, inside the federal health bureaucracy.
Under the Trump administration, the CDC formally removed the COVID vaccine from the recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women. That decision now looks less like an overcorrection and more like a long-overdue acknowledgment of what the people in charge privately knew all along.
Sen. Paul’s drive for accountability has been persistent. He moved toward contempt charges after Fauci repeatedly refused to answer questions under oath, a posture that looks considerably worse now that the phone tells a story Fauci’s own testimony would not.
The damage here is not abstract. Real women made real decisions about their pregnancies based on public guidance from officials who, behind closed doors, were discussing risks those women never heard about. Informed consent requires information. What Fauci, Walensky, and Murthy provided was something closer to managed confidence, a carefully curated message designed to maintain vaccine uptake, not to give individual women the full picture.
That is not science. That is public relations. And the people who paid the price were not the officials crafting the message. They were the mothers who trusted it.
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