His Private Text Said ‘Miscarriage.’ Nine Days Later, He Told Pregnant Women There Were ‘No Red Flags.’
- Jan. 25, 2021 the date Fauci privately texted incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and incoming Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that a second vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester” — Sen. Ron Johnson press release, Aug. 10, 2026
- 9 Days later, Fauci told JAMA the FDA had found “no red flags” for pregnant women — a reassurance he repeated through 2021 as the government urged pregnant women to get vaccinated — Fox News; Blaze Media, Aug. 10, 2026
- 34,000+ texts and 522 voicemails on the government iPhone HHS turned over to Sen. Ron Johnson's subcommittee — this is only the first tranche released — ronjohnson.senate.gov, Aug. 10, 2026
- “Truly Sick” how Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) described mandating a shot for pregnant women while officials privately weighed a miscarriage risk — Fox News Digital, Aug. 10, 2026
- 14.1% the corrected miscarriage-risk estimate the same study's own authors later published, after acknowledging the 12.6% figure officials cited publicly used the wrong denominator — NEJM correspondence, Sept. 2021
On January 25, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci texted two officials who were about to run the incoming Biden administration’s COVID-19 response: incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and incoming Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Enough vaccine recipients were running fevers after the second dose, he wrote, that the reaction “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Nine days later, in a livestreamed interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci told a different audience something different. The FDA had “found, thus far…no red flags about that, about pregnant women,” he said. He kept saying versions of that through 2021, as the CDC formally recommended pregnant women get vaccinated and the government pressed the shot on expectant mothers nationwide.
The text surfaced publicly on August 10, 2026, when Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) released the first batch of messages pulled from Fauci’s old government iPhone — more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails HHS had turned over five days earlier. It is new material, distinct from the diary Paul released in July and the 111 times Fauci pleaded the Fifth at a hearing that same month: this is the first look at what was actually on the phone, and it centers on the one population the government spent all of 2021 trying hardest to reassure.
The full exchange runs longer than the single line most outlets have quoted. Fauci opened by telling Walensky and Murthy he had “asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of.” In the same thread he added there was “no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred” and that, absent data, officials would have to “weigh the potential risks against the benefits.”
“Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci · text to Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy · Jan. 25, 2021 · released by Sen. Ron Johnson, Aug. 10, 2026
Walensky’s reply, released in the same chain: “Definitely a good point, esp after dose two.” She and Murthy went on to describe the underlying evidence as largely data free — pregnant women had been excluded from the original vaccine trials — while noting the CDC was standing up a pregnancy registry to start collecting real numbers. Fauci’s own text acknowledged that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated by that point with no issues reported. The conversation reads less like officials hiding a known danger than like specialists naming a plausible risk out loud, privately, before anyone had the data to say for certain either way.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) releases text obtained from Dr. Fauci's phone that shows Fauci expressing concern in January 2021 that the second dose of a COVID vaccine could potentially be 'associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.'
The gap wasn’t hidden — it was on the public record within Fauci’s own words, just spread months apart. On February 3, 2021, in that JAMA interview, he cited more than 10,000 vaccinations without a reported problem. On February 10, at a White House COVID briefing, he repeated the reassurance with the number closer to 20,000. By August 2021, promoting the CDC’s push to vaccinate expectant mothers, he went further: “There’s no indication whatsoever that there’s any increase of any adverse issues in a pregnant woman who was vaccinated.” The CDC made the recommendation formal on August 11, 2021, urging everyone who was pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to become pregnant, or might become pregnant to get the shot.
None of those later statements repeated the word he had used privately in January. That is the substance of Johnson and Paul’s complaint: not that Fauci lied about data that did not yet exist, but that the language he chose for the public dropped the specific risk he had flagged for colleagues in favor of a blanket “no red flags” that a pregnant woman weighing the shot had no way to unpack. CBS News, reporting on the release, said it sought comment from Fauci’s attorneys and from Walensky and Murthy directly; none had responded as of publication.
Johnson’s office paired the text with a second, older document: a June 2021 New England Journal of Medicine paper by CDC epidemiologist Tom Shimabukuro, the first published look at the same pregnancy data Fauci and Walensky discussed in January. That paper reported a 12.6 percent miscarriage rate — 104 of 827 completed pregnancies — and called it consistent with the general population’s background rate. Officials, including Fauci, cited that comparison publicly for months.
There was a problem with the math, and the study’s own authors eventually said so in writing. Most of those 827 “completed pregnancies” belonged to women vaccinated in their third trimester — past the point where a first-trimester miscarriage was even possible to record. Counting them inside a flat 12.6 percent, as the original paper did, diluted the real risk window. Johnson’s office reran the numbers using only the women vaccinated before 20 weeks who had a completed pregnancy by the data cutoff — 127 of them — and got 104 miscarriages against that narrower group, or roughly 82 percent.
That figure is also contested, for a related reason: restricting the count to only completed pregnancies cuts out everyone still pregnant when the data closed, which skews the rate upward the same way the original 12.6 percent skewed it down. When the study’s authors published a formal correction later in 2021, running a full time-to-event analysis across 2,465 people vaccinated before 20 weeks, they landed on a cumulative miscarriage risk of 14.1 percent — near the range typically cited for unvaccinated pregnancies. A separate CDC-funded Vaccine Safety Datalink study of 105,446 pregnancies, published that October in JAMA, found no increased odds of miscarriage tied to vaccination at all.
None of that changes what Fauci wrote on January 25 or what he told the public on February 3 — those are documented, dated, and not in dispute. It does mean the 82 percent figure Johnson is using to underline the danger is not the number the underlying science actually supports, and neither, on the study authors’ own correction, was the 12.6 percent Fauci and Walensky cited to reassure the public.
“We tell pregnant women don't even have a glass of wine and yet we coerce them, convince them, sometimes mandated them, to get an experimental gene therapy as early as the first trimester. This is truly sick.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) · Fox News Digital · Aug. 10, 2026
Johnson called the release “just the tip of the iceberg” of what remains on the phone, and he was not the only Trump-administration official to weigh in. Jay Bhattacharya, the current NIH director, said Fauci “was out of his lane, and used that power to tell America one thing when he really thought another.” Asked about the release the same day he signed an executive order overhauling the childhood vaccine schedule, President Donald Trump (R) called the underlying handling of the pandemic “a disaster in every way,” adding of the Biden administration generally: “It’s unimaginable what they did.”
NEW FAUCI DROP: Sen. Ron Johnson joins me in the latest release of text messages from Anthony Fauci. Once again, Anthony Fauci was saying one thing in public and something completely different in private.
The texts are also, by design, unfinished business. Johnson’s subcommittee has published only the first slice of the 34,000-plus messages recovered from Fauci’s old phone — the same device Fauci was still declining to discuss when he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times before Paul’s committee on July 29, and the same one at the center of the criminal contempt resolution the committee approved 8-5 on August 6. Whatever the rest of the phone contains, this batch stands on its own: a specific, dated text about a specific population, released alongside the specific reassurance that followed nine days later — not an inference, not a diary entry open to interpretation, but two of Fauci’s own statements, in his own words, about the same subject, nine days apart.
On January 25, 2021, Anthony Fauci told two incoming health officials that a COVID vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” Nine days later he told the public there were “no red flags” for pregnant women — and kept saying so through the CDC’s formal vaccination recommendation that August. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) released the exchange on August 10, 2026, from a phone the government handed over five days earlier. The 82 percent miscarriage rate Johnson is citing to underline the danger is not the figure the underlying science actually supports — but that dispute is about the size of the risk, not about what Fauci wrote privately or what he chose to say publicly instead. Both are now on the record, in his own words, nine days apart.
