Text messages from January 2021 show Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy privately debating whether COVID-19 mRNA vaccines posed a theoretical miscarriage risk for pregnant women, concerns the public rarely heard at that volume.
Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky released the documents on Monday, pulling back the curtain on a candid exchange among three of the most powerful public-health officials in the country. The messages, which Fox News reported appear on page two of the released documents, reveal that Fauci raised the possibility that cytokine-related fever after the second mRNA dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."
Walensky did not push back. She replied that it was "definitely a good point, esp after dose two." Murthy agreed, calling Fauci's cytokine observation "a really good point."
The exchange unfolded over two days in January 2021, during the earliest weeks of the national vaccine rollout. Pregnant women across the country were already making decisions about whether to get the shot, and the officials guiding the federal response were, in private, airing the very doubts that critics would later be dismissed for raising in public.
The conversation did not stay on clinical risk for long. By the following day, Murthy shifted the discussion toward messaging. He warned that issuing a strong recommendation against vaccination for pregnant women based on a lack of data could be "potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women."
That framing is worth pausing on. Murthy's stated concern was not primarily whether the vaccines were safe for expectant mothers. It was whether admitting uncertainty would shake confidence in the broader vaccination campaign. The priority, at least in that message, was perception management.
Murthy also flagged a World Health Organization recommendation at the time that advised against the use of Moderna's vaccine in pregnant women because of limited data. Walensky acknowledged the concern and said she would flag the issue for an upcoming meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC panel that shapes federal vaccine recommendations.
What came out of that ACIP meeting, and whether Walensky followed through, remains unclear from the released documents. The public record shows that federal agencies continued to allow pregnant women to choose vaccination, and the messaging apparatus never adopted the cautious tone Fauci's own texts suggested might be warranted.
Fauci's messages were not uniformly alarming. He wrote that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated with "no issues" reported. He cited guidance from the FDA, ACIP, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, all of which allowed pregnant women to opt for vaccination. He also noted that animal toxicology studies had not raised red flags.
But the same exchange shows Fauci stating there was "no data or theoretical reason" to believe vaccination earlier in pregnancy should be preferred, an acknowledgment that the data simply was not there to guide timing decisions with any confidence. He emphasized that officials had to weigh the risks of vaccination against the risks of COVID-19 itself, a reasonable point that nonetheless underscores how much of the early guidance rested on judgment calls rather than hard evidence.
Murthy, for his part, wrote that he had been hearing concerns about mRNA technology causing mutations in a developing fetus. Fauci dismissed that specific worry as a misconception. But the broader picture, senior officials privately debating theoretical harms while the public-facing message remained one of confident reassurance, is difficult to square with the trust the government demanded from ordinary Americans.
Fauci's own diary entries have already undercut his congressional testimony on other COVID-related matters, raising questions about the consistency of his public and private positions throughout the pandemic.
The release of these text messages is the latest in a sustained effort by Johnson and Paul to force transparency around the federal COVID-19 response. Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has been particularly aggressive in pursuing Fauci's records. He has scheduled a committee vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over what Paul has described as misleading testimony.
The senators have not disclosed the full scope of the released documents or the process through which they obtained them. The article does not specify whether the texts were produced through a congressional subpoena, a Freedom of Information request, or another mechanism. But the documents add to a growing body of material that shows federal health leaders saying one thing behind closed doors and another at the podium.
Paul has also moved to fast-track the contempt vote before Senate recess, signaling that Republicans view Fauci's credibility as a matter of institutional accountability, not just political theater.
The federal scrutiny is not the only front. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and officials in other states have launched investigations into Fauci's role in the pandemic response. The specifics of those probes, including which states beyond Florida are involved and what legal theories they are pursuing, remain limited in the public record so far.
Fauci received a preemptive pardon before leaving federal service, a move that has drawn its own scrutiny. Alabama and Florida have pushed state-level cases against Fauci after he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times during prior proceedings, a legal right, certainly, but one that sits uneasily next to years of public assurances that he had nothing to hide.
Whether those state investigations can survive the legal shield of a presidential pardon is an open question. But the political message is clear: elected officials in multiple states believe the federal COVID response caused real harm, and they are not satisfied with the answers Washington has provided.
The private doubts captured in these texts gain sharper edges when set against the scale of the federal government's public vaccination push. A House Energy and Commerce Committee report found that the Department of Health and Human Services spent more than $911 million on its "We Can Do This" COVID vaccination campaign between August 2020 and June 2023. That campaign, the New York Post reported, "consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children" and made claims about vaccine effectiveness against transmission that went beyond what the FDA's emergency use authorization actually supported.
The House report noted that the CDC "began to edit and erase" campaign videos from YouTube as congressional investigators looked into the matter. None of those ads remain publicly available. The campaign also continued to push child vaccinations even as other major industrialized nations declined to recommend COVID shots for healthy children, a fact that received almost no attention in American media at the time.
Walensky herself told a Senate hearing in May 2021 that data had "demonstrated, even if you were to get infected during post-vaccination, that you cannot give it to anyone else." The House committee's own report found that claim went beyond the evidence. The gap between what officials said publicly and what the data actually showed is the recurring theme of every new document release.
Fauci's personal COVID diaries, released separately by Paul's committee, have painted a picture of a public-health leader whose attention was divided between the crisis and the celebrity it brought him, a pattern that raises its own questions about judgment and priorities.
Several questions remain unanswered. The released documents do not show what happened after Walensky said she would raise the pregnancy concern at ACIP. There is no indication in the available material of whether federal guidance for pregnant women changed as a result of this exchange, or whether the conversation simply ended without action.
Fauci, Walensky, and Murthy have not publicly responded to the release of these specific messages. The documents do not reveal who provided the texts to the senators or under what authority. And the full contents of the released packet remain only partially described.
None of that changes what the texts themselves show: three of the most influential health officials in the country acknowledged, in private, that the mRNA vaccines carried a theoretical risk for pregnant women in their first trimester, and then worried, also in private, about what it would do to "public confidence" if they said so out loud.
Americans who asked the same questions in public were called misinformation spreaders. The people who were supposed to give them straight answers were asking those questions behind closed doors, and choosing not to share the conversation.
