Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky released text messages from Dr. Anthony Fauci's government-issued cellphone Monday, revealing that Fauci privately worried in January 2021 that the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine could theoretically be linked to miscarriage in the first trimester of pregnancy — a concern he did not articulate publicly at the time.
The messages date to Jan. 25 and 26, 2021, just weeks after the first COVID vaccines became available to the American public. The three-way exchange involved Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. All three were central figures in the federal government's pandemic response and regularly addressed the public on vaccine safety.
Murthy opened the exchange by asking Fauci and Walensky whether they had seen a World Health Organization advisory against pregnant women receiving the Moderna vaccine due to insufficient data. "It has led to a flurry of questions. What is your take? I imagine we will all get asked about this," Murthy said, according to the texts released by Johnson and Paul.
Fauci replied that when it came to pregnant women, the relevant calculation was weighing potential risks against the benefits of vaccination versus contracting COVID-19 itself. He added that animal toxicology studies had not raised any red flags. But he also flagged that the second dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester" — language that contrasted with the public guidance health officials offered pregnant women during the same period.
Murthy then described the WHO statement as a strong one that was "potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women," according to the released messages. Walensky's responses in the exchange have not been fully detailed in the material the senators published.
The phone's contents extend well beyond this single conversation. Johnson and Paul said the device contains more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails. Investigators noted an anomaly in the phone's contact list: only three contacts appear by name. All other text messages display only phone numbers, with no associated names. The senators' investigators said it is too early to determine whether data has been deleted from the device, but the discrepancy raised enough concern to flag it explicitly in their findings.
Johnson has separately requested transcribed interviews with Fauci and with senior Food and Drug Administration officials. He has alleged that FDA leadership ignored warnings that the agency's vaccine safety monitoring system was not detecting potential safety signals during the rollout. Johnson is now asking Fauci to appear before his committee in a format modeled on the closed-door transcribed interviews the House Oversight Committee has used in its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein — a format under which interview transcripts have been released to the public within days of each session.
Fauci's appearance before Congress is not new territory. He testified before the Senate last month, during which he invoked the Fifth Amendment — the constitutional protection against self-incrimination — 111 times. That hearing produced no substantive on-the-record answers from Fauci, which Johnson cited as justification for pursuing a transcribed interview format that creates a written record.
The release puts a specific date and language to what had previously been a broader Republican argument: that federal health officials privately held doubts they did not share with the public. The texts do not show Fauci concluding the vaccine was unsafe for pregnant women — his message explicitly framed the question as a risk-benefit calculation and noted that animal studies were reassuring. But the gap between the private flagging of a theoretical miscarriage risk and the public messaging at the time is now documented in his own words.
The senators have not released the full 34,000-message archive. Johnson's stated next step is securing Fauci's participation in a transcribed interview before his committee, a request Fauci has not publicly responded to as of publication.
