In January 2021, Dr Anthony Fauci discussed a theoretical risk of miscarriage following the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine during the first trimester, according to a text message retrieved from Fauci’s cellphone.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided the contents of Fauci’s government-issued cellphone in response to a request from Johnson, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Paul chairs the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

According to the senators, Fauci’s phone contains more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails. Only three contacts are listed by name. The other messages appear under phone numbers. The senators said it is too early to determine whether any data were deleted from the phone before Fauci turned it in when he retired in December 2022.

The senators said their staff members will review the material before releasing additional messages, in part to protect the privacy of people who communicated with Fauci and to exclude personal messages unrelated to his government work.

The first released exchange, dated January 25-26, 2021, is between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The conversation concerns Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy.

In one message, Fauci wrote that a second vaccine dose in the first trimester “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” according to the senators.

At the time, data on vaccination during pregnancy were limited. Federal health officials later cited accumulating surveillance data in recommending vaccination for pregnant women.

On August 11, 2021, the CDC said an analysis of its V-safe pregnancy registry found no increased risk of miscarriage among nearly 2,500 pregnant women who received an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy. The agency encouraged pregnant women to get vaccinated.

The CDC issued an urgent pregnancy health advisory the following month, saying the benefits of vaccination outweighed known or potential risks. The agency also warned that Covid-19 infection during pregnancy increased the risk of severe illness and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

The scientific evidence cited by federal health officials subsequently evolved. A June 2021 report in the New England Journal of Medicine initially reported that 104 of 827 participants with completed pregnancies had experienced spontaneous abortions, a figure of 12.6 per cent.

The authors noted, however, that most participants who received their first vaccine dose in the third trimester had already passed the period during which spontaneous abortion could occur.

A subsequent analysis published in the journal, using life table methods, estimated the cumulative risk of spontaneous abortion among women vaccinated before 20 weeks of pregnancy at 14.1 per cent, or 12.8 per cent after age standardisation. The authors said those estimates were consistent with risks reported in the general population.

The CDC’s current guidance says studies involving more than 1 million pregnant women have not found an increased risk of miscarriage, preterm delivery, stillbirth or birth defects associated with Covid-19 vaccination. The agency says vaccination during pregnancy can reduce the risk of severe Covid-19 illness.

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​​The disclosure comes as Johnson and Paul question whether federal health officials fully communicated the uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy as recommendations were being developed early in the vaccine rollout. It also comes as Fauci’s Covid-19-related protocols involving vaccine safety face new scrutiny.

Fauci refused to discuss what he knew about how the Covid-19 vaccine posed negative health impacts at a July 29 congressional hearing. During the hearing, lawmakers asked Fauci at least 111 questions about the origins of Covid-19 and his role in leading the government’s response to the pandemic.

Every time, Fauci said the same thing: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

A week later, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted in favour of holding Fauci in contempt of Congress, referring him to the US Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

Maryanne Demasi, reported that documents made public by Paul revealed that during a critical juncture in the global vaccine rollout, Nobel laureate Drew Weissman, one of mRNA’s key creators, alerted Fauci to troubling laboratory findings about Covid-19 vaccines in pregnant animals.

On February 8, 2021, Weissman emailed Fauci, saying his lab discovered that when injected into pregnant mice, mRNA-lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) crossed the placenta and entered the foetus, generating viral proteins and triggering an immune response in the amniotic fluid. In non-pregnant mice, the LNPs accumulated in the uterus and ovaries.

In his diary, Fauci noted that the US Food and Drug Administration and both vaccine manufacturers considered Weissman’s findings “invalid.” However, Fauci appeared concerned that Weissman’s results could create a public relations nightmare, as Weissman planned to go public with the findings.

Fauci wrote, “We cannot blow them off for obvious reasons. The fact that they are holding a press conference is going to create a huge mess.”

Instead, Fauci hoped repeat studies could be performed “to counter this finding.”

According to Demasi, Weissman later came out publicly as saying it was “absolutely impossible” for the LNPs in Covid-19 vaccines to persist in the body or spread far beyond the injection site. However, studies conducted since then have continued to underscore the Covid-19 vaccines’ potential harm to pregnant women and developing foetuses.

An analysis of reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) found safety signals for 37 adverse events when Covid-19 vaccines were administered during pregnancy, according to a 2025 study published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.

Miscarriage, preeclampsia, cervical insufficiency, chromosomal abnormalities, foetal malformations, premature birth, stillbirth, new-born asphyxia and new-born death were among the signals flagged.

A 2023 analysis by statistician and Luzern University professor Dr Konstantin Beck showed that a major increase in spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, among pregnant women was directly linked to the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine in Switzerland.

Beck, a former adviser to the German Minister of Health and the Swiss Parliament, analysed publicly available Swiss and German data from scientific publications, health insurance companies and the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics.

He found that miscarriages and stillbirth rates in 2022 corresponded directly to Covid-19 vaccination among pregnant women in Switzerland nine months earlier. And, he said, vaccine makers and public health officials either knew or could have known this information at the time, if they cared to look. Instead, they presented the information to the public in a way that obscured the risks.

In 2025, Spanish researchers reported that among pregnant women who tested positive for Covid-19, the women who received a Covid-19 vaccine were significantly more likely to miscarry compared to women who didn’t get a Covid-19 vaccine.

The researchers, who published their results in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, a Springer journal, retrospectively examined a sample of 156 pregnant women who tested positive for Covid-19 during pregnancy between 2020 and 2022.

Of these, 45 women had received at least one Covid-19 vaccine. Among the vaccinated group, six women (13.3 per cent) had miscarriages with five of the miscarriages occurring in women who were vaccinated in the first or second trimester of pregnancy. Five miscarriages were recorded among the larger group (111) of unvaccinated women, resulting in a miscarriage rate of 4.5 per cent.

According to Trial Site News, the higher miscarriage rate among vaccinated women in the first two trimesters is “a concerning anomaly” that “raises the need for more robust trimester-stratified safety analyses.”

However, the authors said their study showed that the Covid-19 vaccine was linked to reduced symptoms, such as headache and vomiting, and fewer maternal complications, including pneumonia. They said their findings “reinforce the effectiveness and safety of Covid-19 vaccination in pregnant women.”

The senators said they intend to release additional relevant material after reviewing the records and removing information that could compromise personal privacy or is unrelated to the public health issues under investigation.

• A Tell Media report / Suzanne Burdick – A senior reporter for The Defender based in Austin, Texas.
• Henrick Karoliszyn – An investigative reporter for The Defender.