On Monday, Republican senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin—both fierce critics of Anthony Fauci—released a number of pandemic-era text messages from the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One exchange in particular has raised the ire of his many critics.
In January 2021, Fauci exchanged a series of texts with then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the Biden administration, about whether it was safe for pregnant women to take the Covid vaccine. After the first messages, Fauci wrote another one two hours later.
“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 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” he wrote. Cytokines include inflammatory molecules that catalyze attacks inside the body.
A few days later, Fauci noted that pregnant women had to evaluate “the potential risks versus the benefits” of taking the vaccine. But then, in a public discussion with Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci said flatly that the CDC had found “no red flags” in a Covid vaccine study that included 10,000 pregnant women. His public confidence, of course, was at odds with the private hypotheses he had discussed with Murthy and Walensky.
I was a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco during Covid, and a critic of much of the government’s response to the pandemic. At an absolute minimum, the disclosed text messages reveal concerning facts about our Covid vaccine response. There was more uncertainty than officials were willing to let on to the public. And as the public has learned that officials were not being straight with them, their faith in public-health efforts has been badly damaged.
