Republican senators released private text messages showing Dr. Anthony Fauci speculated in January 2021 that the COVID vaccine's second dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage", and women across the country are now sharing devastating stories of loss.
The texts, published by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul as part of their ongoing investigation into Fauci, reveal a private conversation between three of the nation's top health officials at a moment when pregnant women were being urged to get vaccinated. In one message dated January 25 or 26, 2021, Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote that "[with regard to] pregnant women one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits." Another message shows him acknowledging that the second dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester," even as he noted that "animal tox studies did not raise any red flags."
The gap between what Fauci said privately and what the government told the public has drawn fierce reaction. Women who suffered miscarriages during the pandemic are now asking whether they were denied information that might have changed their decisions. The texts do not prove the vaccine caused miscarriages, but they show that the man directing the nation's COVID response harbored concerns he never shared with the people most affected.
Fauci was not the only senior official with concerns. The text thread included former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In the same January 2021 exchange, Murthy asked Fauci and Walensky whether they had seen a World Health Organization advisory "against pregnant women taking the [Moderna] vaccine bc [because] of lack of data."
Murthy called the WHO statement a "strong [one] to make" and warned it was "potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women." He added: "It has led to a flurry of questions. What is your take? I imagine we will all get asked about this."
The concern, in other words, was not only medical. It was reputational. Murthy's worry centered on how the WHO advisory would play with the public, not on whether pregnant women deserved to hear it. As of February 2026, the CDC maintains that "COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risks for pregnant women or babies." That official position has not changed, but the newly released texts show the private conversation told a more complicated story.
Within hours of the texts going public, women and families began posting their own accounts. Meghan McCain, who has three children with journalist Ben Domenech, was among the most prominent voices. She posted on X: "Put Fauci in jail! I am a woman who was pregnant and had a miscarriage during COVID."
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman disclosed that his wife, Neri Oxman, suffered seven miscarriages while the couple tried to have a second child during the pandemic. "Neri (and I) had seven miscarriages trying to have a second child during Covid and then the time ran out," Ackman wrote. He directed his anger squarely at Fauci, adding a profanity-laced question about what Fauci had been thinking.
The stories were not limited to public figures. A social media user identified as Roxy wrote that she miscarried at 12 weeks, just five days after receiving a booster shot. She said a nurse practitioner had told her she "would be more worried about me as a mother if I declined it." Another user said her daughter was forced to get the vaccine to keep her healthcare job and lost her second baby at 15 weeks. "I had a hunch this was the reason," the user wrote. "Words fail me right now. I am sick to my stomach."
One parent described a daughter who took the first two shots to keep her job and then had two first-trimester miscarriages, one in 2023, another in 2024. The daughter eventually had a healthy child in 2025. A woman named Martha said her friend miscarried and "can't help but suspect it was related to the vaccine." She added that her friend "would be devastated if she knew positively it was related as she got the vaccine on a whim when it was mass promoted and before people started figuring out there were issues."
Lindsey Brown, a news anchor for KSTP in Minnesota, offered one of the most measured responses. Brown, who had already suffered two miscarriages before the pandemic, wrote on X that she took the COVID vaccine while pregnant but was "terrified and skipped dose two while pregnant." She said she trusted her gut. "By the grace of God, Oliver was born healthy," she wrote.
Brown made clear she was not claiming the vaccine caused miscarriages. "This does NOT prove the vaccine caused miscarriages. That's not my point," she wrote. "COVID became political, but this shouldn't be. Pregnant women deserved to know the uncertainties experts discussed privately. You can support vaccines and demand transparency." She expressed hope that the released text messages receive "the same scrutiny given to people who questioned the vaccines at the time."
That framing, transparency, not anti-vaccine activism, captures the core frustration. The issue is not whether the vaccine definitively caused miscarriages. The issue is that senior officials discussed potential risks behind closed doors while the public message remained uniform reassurance.
Journalist Peter J. Hasson added another dimension. He said his then-pregnant wife was told by her doctor and by teachers at her medical school that it was "totally reasonable to not get the vaccine" after she had already contracted the virus and developed antibodies. But despite that private medical advice, Hasson said his wife struggled to find clinical rotations because of her unvaccinated status.
"And so now, to see Fauci had the same concerns she did? Infuriating," Hasson wrote. Dan Karpuc, a graduate of Fauci's alma mater Holy Cross, said his wife had a miscarriage after taking required shots to keep her healthcare job. He expressed disgust that the college recently renamed a building the "Anthony S Fauci Integrated Sciences Complex."
The pattern across these accounts is consistent: women who felt pressured, by employers, by medical providers, by public messaging, to take a vaccine about which the nation's top health officials were privately uncertain. Many of those women now believe they were denied the information they needed to make a fully informed choice.
The text messages surfaced from Fauci's phone, which Republican senators say contains more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. The phone listed only three contacts, a fact that has raised questions about whether data may have been deleted. Fauci appeared before the Senate last month and invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times, refusing to answer questions from the committee investigating his conduct.
Senator Rand Paul's committee subsequently found Fauci in contempt of Congress, and Paul referred the contempt vote to the Department of Justice. Paul also released Fauci's personal diaries, which have raised separate questions about his public statements during the pandemic.
Senator Ron Johnson has requested transcribed interviews with Fauci and FDA officials, citing the House Oversight Committee's use of a similar process in the Epstein investigations, where information was released to the public within days. Johnson alleges that senior FDA officials ignored warnings that the agency's vaccine safety monitoring system was failing to detect potential safety signals, a charge that, if substantiated, would mean the system designed to catch problems like the ones Fauci privately worried about was broken from the start.
Fauci's personal diaries have already raised questions about the consistency of his congressional testimony. The Daily Mail reported reaching out to Fauci's attorney for comment, but no response was included.
None of the social media accounts shared after the texts' release constitute proof that the COVID vaccine caused any individual miscarriage. The CDC's official position remains that vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risks. The texts themselves do not show Fauci stating that the vaccine directly causes miscarriages.
But the texts do show something that matters: the nation's most powerful public health official privately weighed a risk he never shared publicly. He speculated about a theoretical link to first-trimester miscarriage at the very moment pregnant women were being told the shots were safe and, in many cases, required by their employers. The WHO itself had issued a warning about the Moderna vaccine and pregnant women due to lack of data, and the top U.S. officials' first instinct, based on the texts, was to worry about public confidence rather than public disclosure.
Meanwhile, Fauci's broader conduct during the pandemic, including his relationships with journalists and his management of public messaging, continues to face scrutiny as the Senate investigation widens.
Pregnant women did not need a guarantee of danger. They needed honesty about uncertainty. What these texts show is that the people who had that information kept it to themselves, and the people who needed it most were left to trust their gut, or not, with no idea what the experts were saying behind closed doors.
