Anthony Fauci privately told two of America’s most senior health officials that COVID-19 vaccination could theoretically be associated with first-trimester miscarriage, nine days before assuring a public audience that regulators had found no red flags in pregnant women.
He has since declined to answer questions about any of it. At a July 29 hearing on pandemic origins, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination more than 100 times.
The messages were published on August 10 by Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. They were recovered from a government-issued handset the Department of Health and Human Services surrendered on August 5, five years after the events it records.
The device holds more than 34,000 messages and 522 voicemails. It lists three named contacts. Every other correspondent appears as a bare telephone number. The senators said they could not yet establish whether material had been deleted.
Brussels has produced no comparable record. Five years of litigation have not yet extracted the messages exchanged by the European Commission President during the same procurement.
The exchange runs from January 25 to 26, 2021, weeks after the first doses reached the American market. Fauci was directing the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Rochelle Walensky had just taken over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vivek Murthy was days from becoming surgeon general.
Murthy asked whether there was reason to prefer vaccination earlier or later in pregnancy. Fauci answered that fever and cytokine responses after a second dose ‘theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester’.
Walensky agreed it was ‘definitely a good point, esp after dose two’.
Nine days later, on February 3, Fauci told a Journal of the American Medical Association session that the Food and Drug Administration had found ‘no red flags about that, about pregnant women’. He repeated versions of that assurance through 2021, telling audiences the case for vaccinating pregnant women was not a close call.
Johnson said the chain bore directly on ‘the principle of informed consent’.
The senators’ own release sets the two records side by side: the January texts, then a sequence of public statements from Fauci, Walensky and Murthy stressing that the evidence showed no elevated risk. None of those public statements refers to the private exchange.
The same chain shows Fauci rejecting the claim that mRNA vaccines alter genes, and telling colleagues there were no grounds for preferring early over late vaccination.
Large registry studies conducted since, most of them European, found no increase in first-trimester loss after vaccination — Norwegian data published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a Nordic cohort of 343,066 births, Spanish primary-care records. The European Medicines Agency has said the evidence shows no rise in pregnancy complications. None of that evidence existed in January 2021.
Murthy’s next message went to Europe. He reported that the World Health Organization had advised against Moderna’s vaccine in pregnancy on grounds of limited data, and warned the position could damage confidence. The WHO revised the advice within weeks.
On August 6 the Homeland Security committee voted eight to five, on party lines, to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. Paul sent the referral directly to the Department of Justice rather than to the Senate floor, where it would require 60 votes. A congressional aide confirmed it had been delivered that day.
His argument is that Fauci has nothing to incriminate himself with. Joe Biden issued him a pre-emptive pardon covering January 1, 2014 to January 19, 2025, on the last full day of that administration. Paul contends a witness who has accepted that protection cannot then refuse to answer.
The resolution as drafted requires Vice-President JD Vance, as president of the Senate, to sign off before the Department of Justice can decide whether to prosecute. Legal specialists quoted by US broadcasters said prosecutors would have to show wilful contempt, a difficult standard.
Fauci’s lawyer David Schertler called the vote ‘a crude political stunt intended to punish Dr Fauci’. Fauci told the committee that Paul had an ‘unhinged obsession’ with him. Asked on August 10 whether he had discussed prosecution with Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump said he had not.
Johnson has invited Fauci for a transcribed interview and said he would subpoena him otherwise.
A US Senate committee obtained a departed official’s telephone and, with it, a searchable account of how a public line was assembled. No equivalent record has been released in Brussels.
The European Commission has still not produced the messages exchanged between Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla, which it first said did not exist. The General Court rebuked it over that refusal in May 2025, and an advocate general at the Court of Justice found in June that the executive had failed to grant sufficient access to the purchase contracts.
