A familiar COVID-19 vaccine claim is circulating again nationally after senators released text messages from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government phone in August 2026. The revived post centers on pregnancy and says both Fauci’s texts and federal data showed an 82% miscarriage rate after vaccination. The available records show a more limited story: Fauci discussed a theoretical first-trimester concern in January 2021, while the 82% figure comes from a disputed reworking of preliminary registry data rather than the published miscarriage rate itself.
The texts and the 82% figure come from different things
The current wave of posts followed the release of Fauci text messages by Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul this week, according to material highlighted in news coverage and Senate-linked releases. One January 25, 2021 message described a theoretical concern that fever and inflammatory response after a second vaccine dose in the first trimester could be associated with miscarriage. The same reporting also noted Fauci said no issues had arisen among more than 10,000 vaccinated pregnant women known at that stage.
The 82% figure, however, did not come from that text exchange. It traces back to a 2021 New England Journal of Medicine paper on 3,958 people enrolled in the CDC’s v-safe pregnancy registry, published April 21, 2021, with follow-up later corrected in September 2021. In that study, 827 participants had a completed pregnancy at the time of analysis, including 104 spontaneous abortions, 10 other outcomes and 712 live births, for a published spontaneous abortion figure of 12.6% and total pregnancy-loss figure of 13.9%, according to NEJM.
Posts promoting 82% relied on excluding roughly 700 participants vaccinated in the third trimester from the denominator while keeping 104 miscarriages in the numerator. Fact-checkers and physicians said that approach mixed incomplete follow-up data with a selective denominator because many people vaccinated earlier in pregnancy had not yet reached a completed outcome when the paper was first published. That is why the 82% number kept resurfacing in 2021 and is resurfacing again now.
The core federal registry paper was explicitly labeled preliminary. NEJM reported that most completed pregnancies in the first analysis were among participants vaccinated in the third trimester, a timing issue the authors themselves acknowledged when they said more longitudinal follow-up was needed, especially for people vaccinated earlier in pregnancy. A later correction also clarified table language around pregnancy loss and said a published incidence figure was not applicable.
Follow-up research narrowed the question to miscarriage risk earlier in pregnancy. A CDC-led analysis in the v-safe pregnancy registry reported an age-standardized cumulative risk of spontaneous abortion from 6 to 19 weeks of 12.8%. A CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink study published in JAMA in September 2021 also found no increased odds of COVID-19 vaccination in the 28 days before spontaneous abortion compared with ongoing pregnancies.
Other peer-reviewed studies reached similar conclusions. A Norwegian case-control study published in NEJM in 2021 found no association between first-trimester vaccination and miscarriage. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine continues to state that research shows no increased risk for miscarriage, preterm delivery, low birth weight or birth defects from COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.
What is confirmed is that Fauci’s text reflected caution during an early stage of vaccine rollout, when pregnancy-specific data were still limited. What is not supported by the broader record is the leap from that caution to a settled finding that vaccines caused miscarriages in 82% of pregnancies. The published studies do not report that rate as an observed miscarriage outcome.
The distinction matters because the original paper measured completed pregnancies available at a specific point in time, not final outcomes for everyone enrolled. Researchers, including CDC authors and outside reviewers, said that timing limitation made early-pregnancy risk estimates harder to interpret from the first publication alone. Later analyses were designed to answer that question more directly and did not find an elevated miscarriage risk linked to mRNA vaccination.
For readers seeing the claim again now, the most accurate reading is that the texts show an internal discussion of a hypothetical risk in January 2021, while the data that followed did not establish an 82% miscarriage rate. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s current guidance continues to recommend vaccination during pregnancy, citing accumulated evidence on maternal and fetal safety.