Senators release Fauci texts on weighing COVID vaccine risks in pregnancy

Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released 11 text messages from Anthony Fauci’s former government cellphone that show federal health officials wrestling with whether pregnant women should get COVID-19 vaccines in early 2021. In one January 2021 message, Fauci said a second dose of the COVID vaccine “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

The exchanges show Fauci and other federal health officials discussing how to “weigh the potential risks against the benefits” for pregnant women considering vaccination, at a time when little real-world data was available. Johnson’s office said the released messages were the first tranche from a much larger cache recovered from the device, which held more than 34,000 text messages.

The broader trove also included voicemails and other messages from the phone, according to Johnson’s office. The release landed amid continuing Republican scrutiny of Fauci and federal COVID-era decision-making, and it offered a private view of how top health officials handled an area where the evidence base was still forming.

That caution shifted as more data accumulated. CDC-related guidance later moved to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant or might become pregnant, with SHEA saying the stronger pregnancy recommendation was driven by increasing evidence of safety and effectiveness. CDC materials now state that COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for pregnant women and for people who are trying to get pregnant.

The agency’s research pages now include studies on vaccine receipt during pregnancy and on maternal vaccination effectiveness for infants, reflecting the kind of evidence that was missing when the 2021 texts were written. That later record helps explain why the early messages sounded tentative: officials were trying to make decisions for pregnant patients before the largest safety and effectiveness datasets had accumulated.

The released texts put those first months of uncertainty in writing. They show a public health system balancing caution with urgency, and then recalibrating once the evidence on pregnancy and COVID-19 vaccination became stronger.