Two Republican senators on Monday released the first in a trove of text messages from Anthony S. Fauci’s former government cellphone, including a discussion with health officials about whether the covid vaccine posed a risk for pregnant women.
The messages were released by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who lead panels investigating Fauci, the longtime infectious-disease scientist who left government at the end of 2022 after becoming a highly visible official helping lead the pandemic response.
The texts appear to show an exchange between Fauci and top health officials in January 2021 related to the safety of the covid-19 vaccine for pregnant women.
In one message, according to screenshots the senators released, Fauci wrote: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose. this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
“Definitely a good point, esp after dose two,” then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky responded.
In a news release, the senators pointed to several subsequent public statements from Fauci and other administration officials in which they said the benefits of pregnant women getting vaccinated appeared to outweigh the risks.
In February 2021, for instance, Fauci said the Food and Drug Administration has “found, thus far — and we’ve got to be careful — but thus far, no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”
Some of the statements cited by Johnson and Paul occurred after the CDC officially recommended pregnant women get the vaccine in August 2021, citing an agency analysis that found no increase in miscarriage in pregnant women.
In a statement, Johnson said the release of the texts “could have an immediate impact on public health.” He added that “you don’t wait a day, months, or years, to inform the public of potential dangers.”
The CDC states that with more than a million pregnant women vaccinated globally, studies have not shown increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery and more. Health officials have said such past exchanges reflect the revolving nature of the science and debate at the time.
Fauci declined to comment on the released messages. Walensky and Vivek H. Murthy, at the time a member of President Joe Biden’s covid advisory board who was also included in the texts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pregnant women are historically excluded from clinical trials, including those for the coronavirus vaccine. But it became clear that contracting the virus during pregnancy could be associated with increased risk of preterm birth and other adverse outcomes, and so health officials concluded that the benefits of vaccination appeared to outweigh the risks, according to a former public health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.
The senators said the texts are among more than 34,000 recovered from a copy of Fauci’s former iPhone. It also contains 522 voicemails, they said. The phone was obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by fellow Fauci critics, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Now that we have the documents and Fauci’s government-issued phone, my investigation has only just begun,” Johnson, the chairman of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, wrote Monday on social media.
As part of Paul’s investigation of Fauci, HHS also turned over years of Fauci’s personal diary entries that were collected from government servers.
Last week, a Senate committee that Paul chairs voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer its questions and accused Paul of trying to wrongly entrap him. The Justice Department, which is not obligated to prosecute Fauci, said it received Paul’s letter referring the matter but did not confirm whether it planned to pursue any criminal charges.
In April 2021, a New England Journal of Medicine article written by CDC officials stated that preliminary findings “did not show obvious safety signals” among pregnant women who received the vaccines — meaning there wasn’t an unusual number of adverse events — but added that more follow up was needed.
“Our societies [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine] were strongly recommending and advocating for pregnant women to have access to covid vaccines in the earliest stages of the pandemic because those of us who were dealing with covid in pregnancy were seeing exceptionally high rates of complications,” said Neil S. Silverman, a member of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s Infectious Disease and Emerging Threats Committee and maternal-fetal medicine faculty at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Fauci has faced numerous legal threats from Republicans, including Paul and Johnson, who accuse him of covering up his agency’s funding of risky coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, before the virus was first detected there. Fauci has dismissed those claims as “preposterous.”
Kennedy, his allies and some Republicans in Congress have expressed concerns about vaccine safety.
Kennedy, the founder of a prominent anti-vaccine group, has been an outspoken critic of mRNA-based shots, and once called the coronavirus shots “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Medical experts say covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting people from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized and dying.
Last year, Kennedy sought to no longer recommend the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said it was “concerned” and “extremely disappointed” by the move, and the medical society has continued to recommend the shot for pregnant women.
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for cutting the number of recommended childhood vaccines, spacing out those shots and making other changes that would upend decades of federal guidance on vaccines for children.
Speaking in the Oval Office, the president reiterated his long-held claim that childhood vaccines have led to a rise in U.S. autism cases, an idea that outside researchers have largely debunked.
Mark Berman contributed to this report.