Fauci Privately Worried About COVID-19 Vaccine-Related Miscarriages, Texts Show
by Lewis Thune
(Picture credit NIH)
As part of the United States Senate’s ongoing investigation of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Monday morning released an early 2021 text chain between Fauci, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
The messages, dated January 25th and 26th of 2021, reveal the three openly discussed concerns of COVID vaccine-related miscarriages just five weeks after the vaccine’s public release on December 14, 2020.
After a question from Dr. Murthy as to whether any theoretical reason existed for pregnant women to be vaccinated in one stage of pregnancy rather than another, Fauci replied on his government phone:
“There are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred.”
But a mere two hours later, he amended that response.
“I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you should be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
“Def a good point, esp after dose two,” Walensky said just a minute later. Murthy responded that he’d heard worries that the mRNA COVID vaccine caused mutations in unborn children.
Despite acknowledging these issues privately, Sen. Johnson’s press release includes quotes from all three afterward saying no such issues existed.
“We have to be careful but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women,” Fauci told the Journal of American Medicine in a YouTube livestream just eight days later.
“It’s all the more important for you to get vaccinated if you are pregnant,” Murthy told whattoexpect.com, a pregnancy news and resources website, in February of 2022.
“CDC strongly recommends COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks,” Walensky said in a September 2021 agency alert.
In light of this, Johnson also quoted Dr. James A. Thorp, an OB/GYN and “maternal-fetal medicine specialist” who long held suspicions that the push to vaccinate pregnant women had no scientific basis to suggest its safety.
Thorp was the author of a 2022 open letter to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology that heavily criticized the Shimabukuro study, a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021 that purported to show relative safety for pregnant women who received an mRNA Covid vaccine.
Among other things, Thorp’s report to the Senate Homeland Security Committee observes that the study only covered 10 weeks despite pregnancies lasting 40, crediting its publication to an unmerited effort to combat vaccine hesitancy.
The January 26 text messages show Walensky worrying aloud to Fauci and Murthy that the World Health Organization’s recommending pregnant women not receive the Moderna COVID vaccine could be “quite damaging to public confidence.” Thorp noted that NEJM printed a Walensky op-ed on the same day as the Shimabukuro study.
Furthermore, he noted the study had claimed a spontaneous abortion rate of 12.6% among the sampled population of 827 who received vaccination during pregnancy. However, 700 of the 712 live births occurred among women who had received their first dose of the COVID vaccine in their third trimester, weeks 28-40.
A “spontaneous abortion” occurs at or before 20 weeks of gestation. As such, Thorp states the study shows a staggering 82% spontaneous abortion rate among pregnant women who received COVID mRNA vaccines.
The Nebraska delegation has yet to publicly react to Paul and Johnson’s Monday revelations. Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Don Bacon had previously criticized Fauci’s unwillingness to testify before the Senate committee.
The White House also has yet to comment on the text messages. It broke its own vaccine-related story on Monday, as President Trump signed an executive order changing current vaccine recommendations. The new recommendations call for splitting measles, mumps, and rubella shots into three separate doses.
— Lewis Thune is a writing fellow with The Plains Sentinel.