A government device once locked in Anthony Fauci’s pocket has finally given up its secrets, and what senators found inside is raising fresh questions about what the nation’s top infectious disease official knew — and when.
Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul announced this week that they had obtained a copy of Fauci’s pandemic-era government phone, a device the former NIAID director used throughout his tenure overseeing the country’s Covid-19 response.
The phone’s contents are staggering in scope: more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails sit inside it, despite the device listing just three saved contacts. Johnson and Paul cautioned that investigators cannot yet confirm whether any material has been scrubbed from the phone.
Among the first messages made public is a private conversation from January 25 and 26, 2021 — a two-day window during which Fauci exchanged texts with then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
The subject of their exchange: whether the newly rolled-out Covid vaccine posed a miscarriage risk to pregnant women.
Murthy kicked off the thread with a direct question for Fauci — was there any data, or even a theoretical basis, suggesting pregnant women should get vaccinated earlier rather than later in their pregnancies? He also pressed for a timeline on when more comprehensive safety data might arrive.
At the time, Murthy said, he had been reassuring pregnant patients that clinical trials had turned up no evidence of troubling outcomes.
Fauci’s reply sided with Walensky. He told Murthy there was “no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred.”
He went further, dismissing a circulating rumor that mRNA vaccines could somehow alter a person’s genetic code — a fear he said only intensified when applied to a developing fetus in the womb.
But Fauci wasn’t finished. Roughly two hours after his first message, he texted the group again — this time with a warning he said he’d only just uncovered.
Many vaccine recipients, Fauci explained, suffered a cytokine storm accompanied by fever following their second dose. He raised the possibility that this immune reaction could theoretically trigger a miscarriage if it occurred during the first trimester.
The Cleveland Clinic describes a cytokine storm as a flood of immune-system proteins released all at once by the body — an overreaction capable of damaging tissue and organs.
Walensky’s response was brief but telling: she called it “definitely a good point, esp after dose two.”
Murthy, too, said the warning tracked with what he’d been hearing elsewhere — namely, concerns that mRNA vaccines might cause mutations in developing fetuses. He agreed the cytokine storm theory deserved attention.
Fauci then laid out his broader reasoning: whenever safety data is thin for a specific population, officials must weigh the unknown risks of a vaccine against the known dangers of the disease itself. He noted Covid-19 could hit pregnant women especially hard.
By that point, Fauci said, more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated under the shot’s emergency authorization. His verdict: “No issues have arisen.”
Murthy raised one more red flag in the thread — surprise that the World Health Organization had issued a forceful public statement on the topic, one he worried could shake public trust among expectant mothers.
Weeks later, in a February 2021 interview, Fauci told the public that “no red flags” had surfaced after roughly 20,000 pregnant women received the vaccine — a talking point that would be repeated by health officials for months to come.
Johnson and Paul say the messages released this week represent only a fraction of the material recovered from Fauci’s phone, with tens of thousands of additional texts still under review.
Whether further disclosures will reveal more private deliberations that diverged from the administration’s public messaging remains to be seen.
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