The director of the federal government's own Vaccine Research Center privately told Anthony Fauci in January 2021 to "avoid vaccination" for pregnant women in their first trimester, a warning Fauci never shared with the public.
Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky released the text message over the weekend, adding a second layer to an already damaging set of private communications recovered from Fauci's government-issued cellphone. The phone contained more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, and the material now trickling out paints a picture of senior federal health officials who knew far more about potential vaccine risks than they ever let on.
The newly released text came from Dr. John Mascola, who at the time ran the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency Fauci led. On January 25, 2021, Mascola texted Fauci directly:
"I am corrected on pregnancy studies. Initial Studies avoid vaccination in first trimester due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester[.]"
That same day and into January 26, Fauci was part of a separate text thread with then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In that exchange, Fauci acknowledged the risk in plain terms:
"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 is a severe immune overreaction, the body floods itself with inflammatory proteins, often causing high fever and, in serious cases, organ damage. Fauci was telling two of the country's most powerful public health officials that the second dose of the mRNA vaccine could trigger exactly that response in pregnant women, with miscarriage as a possible result.
Walensky's reply was brief. She called the information "definitely a good post, esp after dose two." Murthy, for his part, said the message was helpful and added that he had been hearing concerns about the mRNA technology causing "mutations" in developing babies. Neither official appears to have raised alarms publicly.
That is the core problem. Three of the highest-ranking health officials in the United States, Fauci, Walensky, and Murthy, exchanged private messages acknowledging potential dangers of COVID-19 vaccination during early pregnancy. Yet all three continued to publicly encourage pregnant women to get vaccinated. The gap between the private conversation and the public posture is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of record.
The New York Post reported that just days after receiving Mascola's warning, Fauci appeared on a JAMA livestream on February 3, 2021, and publicly stated the FDA had found "no red flags" for pregnant women. That public assurance came nine days after his own vaccine research chief told him the opposite, that initial studies deliberately avoided vaccinating women in their first trimester because of miscarriage risk.
The January texts were not the only internal warning Fauci received. As Fox News reported, then-FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock emailed Fauci on May 27, 2021, raising concerns about adverse events following COVID vaccination. Woodcock warned that existing safety surveillance systems could not detect certain side effects and called for a dedicated study.
The Washington Examiner reported that Woodcock's email was blunt. She wrote that "the people's main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this." She added a warning that carried a bureaucratic edge: "if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later."
Woodcock's concern was not limited to pregnancy. She was flagging a broader pattern, unreported adverse events after vaccination that the government's own monitoring tools were missing. And she was telling Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins that ignoring the problem would erode public trust.
Sen. Johnson, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, framed the releases as part of a broader failure by the officials who were supposed to be watching for safety problems. Johnson posted a statement announcing the Mascola text alongside Sen. Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee:
"MORE NEWS: Today, @SenRandPaul and I released additional context to Dr. Fauci's message to Drs. Vivek Murthy and Rochelle Walensky expressing concerns about mRNA COVID shots 'theoretically' resulting in 'miscarriage in the 1st trimester.'"
Johnson also said he wants to hear directly from Mascola. "I am hoping Dr. Mascola will fully cooperate by talking to us and clarifying what this text means," Johnson stated. Several questions remain unanswered: what prior position was Mascola correcting when he wrote "I am corrected on pregnancy studies"? Which specific studies was he referencing? And did anyone at NIAID, the CDC, or the Surgeon General's office act on the information internally?
Johnson put the pattern in stark terms. "We see time and time again, these government officials, whose responsibility was to surveil for safety signals, weren't doing their job," he said. "When they saw something, they covered it up."
Fauci has not addressed the newly released messages. At a Senate hearing on July 29, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the constitutional protection that allows a person to refuse to answer questions that might expose them to criminal liability. He has also refused a private transcribed interview with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
That refusal leaves the public record incomplete. The text messages show what Fauci knew and when he knew it. They show what his subordinates told him. They show what his peers in the Surgeon General's office and at the CDC acknowledged in private. But they do not show why the public message never changed, because the man at the center of the decision will not answer questions.
The timeline is not complicated. On January 25, 2021, Fauci's own vaccine research director told him studies avoided first-trimester vaccination because of fever and miscarriage risk. That same day, Fauci told Walensky and Murthy that the second dose could theoretically cause miscarriage through a cytokine storm. Nine days later, on February 3, Fauci told the public the FDA had found no red flags for pregnant women. Months after that, the FDA's own acting commissioner told him adverse events were going unreported and unstudied.
At no point in this sequence did any of these officials publicly revise their guidance. At no point did they tell pregnant women what they were telling each other.
Pregnant women trusted these officials with the most consequential medical decision a mother can face. The texts show that trust was not returned.
