Fauci texts expose private uncertainty over miscarriage risk during vaccine rollout
August 11, 2026
Summarised by Centrist
US senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul have released a text-message exchange from Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone in which the former US health official discussed a possible theoretical miscarriage risk associated with Covid-19 vaccination during the early rollout.
In the January 2021 exchange, Fauci wrote that the second vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester”.
That sentence does not prove that Covid vaccination caused miscarriages. It records a theoretical concern in a private discussion about fever and immune response, at a time when officials were working through limited data on vaccination during pregnancy.
But it is still newsworthy because public-health communication depends on people believing they are being told what officials know, what they do not know, and what they are still investigating.
The senators said the messages could affect “public health and the principle of informed consent”. Their release states that Fauci was texting with then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and that the conversation concerned pregnant women and the Covid injection.
At the same time, health agencies were publicly reassuring people. Fauci said in February 2021 that regulators had found “thus far no red flags” concerning pregnant women, while stressing that caution was required.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal, Senators Johnson and Paul release here, and here
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