Sen. Ron Johnson released text messages from Dr. Anthony Fauci's government phone showing the former NIAID director warned colleagues that COVID-19 vaccines could theoretically cause first-trimester miscarriages, even as he publicly said there were "no red flags."
The January 25, 2021, text went to two of the most powerful public health officials in the country: then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy, who would become surgeon general under President Biden. In it, Fauci wrote that he had been asking around about the mRNA shots and flagged a concern he wanted both to know about.
"Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester," Fauci wrote.
Nine days later, on February 3, 2021, Fauci appeared on a JAMA livestream and told the public the opposite. "Thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women," he said publicly. That gap, between what Fauci told senior officials in private and what he told millions of Americans on camera, is now the central question driving a Senate investigation that Johnson says is only getting started.
The text message is part of the first tranche of material pulled from Fauci's government-issued iPhone, which the Department of Health and Human Services turned over to Senate investigators. Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, obtained the device alongside Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. The phone holds more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, according to the senators' review.
Johnson told Fox News Digital he released this particular exchange ahead of the rest because it carries immediate public safety implications. His staff flagged the message, and he decided the public could not wait.
"This is going to take time, but when my staff saw this, I mean, to me, this immediately impacts public safety, immediately impacts informed consent," Johnson said. "And so I had to get this one out there right away. But there are, I'm sure, way more to come."
Johnson framed the release as the opening move in a much larger effort. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg," he said.
Fauci had already drawn intense congressional scrutiny before the phone was obtained. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before a Senate committee, refusing to answer questions about his conduct during the pandemic. Paul subsequently moved to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, and the Senate committee voted to do so. The contempt referral was then handed to the Department of Justice.
The senator did not stop at the text message. He connected Fauci's private concern to a study published five months later, in June 2021, in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study, authored by Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, examined 827 pregnancies in women who received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. It reported 104 cases of what the researchers called "spontaneous abortions", the clinical term for miscarriage.
Johnson argued that the study's headline finding obscured a far more alarming number. Of the 827 women in the study, he said, 700 received the vaccine in the third trimester, well past the window where miscarriage typically occurs. Only 127 received it in the first or second trimester, which is the period Fauci himself had flagged as a concern. Johnson said all 104 miscarriages occurred among that smaller group.
"So the proper percentage is 104 divided by 127, an 82% miscarriage rate with women who got the injection in the first second trimester. I mean, that is shocking, and they knew it. They knew it, they're not that stupid. They're just that devious to play with the statistics that way to misinform, to lie to the American public."
That 82 percent figure is Johnson's own calculation based on his reading of the study's data. The study itself has not been quoted directly in the materials released so far, and it is not clear whether the researchers presented the numbers the same way Johnson does. But the senator's broader point, that lumping third-trimester vaccinations into the denominator diluted the miscarriage rate among early-pregnancy recipients, raises a question that federal health agencies have not publicly addressed in the terms Johnson is demanding.
Johnson said he had never heard a federal health official acknowledge the risk Fauci described in his text. "I've never heard a federal health official admit that about the injections," he told Fox News Digital. And yet pregnant women across the country were urged, and in some workplaces, required, to take the shots.
As Johnson put it in his Fox News interview:
"We tell pregnant women don't even have a glass of wine and yet we coerce them, convince them, sometimes mandated them, to get an experimental gene therapy as early as the first trimester. This is truly sick."
The text messages land in a broader context that makes them harder to dismiss as a one-off. Fauci's inner circle at the National Institutes of Health had already been caught using private communication channels to dodge federal transparency laws.
A top Fauci aide identified as Morens used personal Gmail accounts to conduct official government business with both Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that funneled U.S. grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Morens explicitly described learning how to make emails "disappear" before Freedom of Information Act searches could capture them. In a February 24, 2021, email, Morens wrote that he had learned "how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA'd but before the search starts." He later told EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to contact him only through Gmail to avoid government record capture, National Review reported.
The NIH's Office of General Counsel also instructed the FOIA office to withhold all documents related to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That directive, combined with Morens's admitted use of private channels, suggests a deliberate institutional effort to keep the public from seeing what officials were discussing behind closed doors.
Against that backdrop, the recovery of 34,000 texts from Fauci's government phone takes on added weight. If senior officials were actively routing sensitive conversations through private accounts to avoid disclosure, the messages that remained on a government device may represent only a fraction of what was actually said.
Johnson said his investigation is being approached carefully and will take time. "While I've been conducting oversight for years, now that we have the documents and Fauci's government-issued phone, my investigation has only just begun," he said, as Just The News reported.
The congressional pressure is not the only front. Multiple states have launched their own investigations into Fauci's pandemic-era conduct, adding a layer of legal exposure that extends beyond Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, Sens. Paul and Johnson have separately pressed the Trump DOJ to challenge Fauci's Biden-era pardon in court, signaling that Republicans view the legal questions surrounding Fauci as far from settled.
Fox News Digital reported that it did not immediately receive comment from the law firm representing Fauci. Whether Fauci will respond publicly to the released texts, or continue to invoke legal protections, remains to be seen.
Johnson made clear he believes the January 2021 text is not an isolated finding but the beginning of a much larger accounting. "What you have to connect this to is what they were saying publicly, that was contrary to that, but also what they're publishing," he said. The senator argued that Fauci and other top officials knew the risks, said nothing to the public, and allowed a study to be published in a way that obscured the danger to pregnant women in their first trimester.
Millions of women made medical decisions for themselves and their unborn children based on public assurances from officials who, in private, were raising the very concerns those women were never told about. If the remaining 34,000 messages contain more of the same, the word Johnson used, "sick", may turn out to be an understatement.
