The Fauci Phone Fallout
The bad doctor privately talked about doubts regarding COVID vaccination for pregnant women while publicly denying there were any “red flags” at all.
The issue with Anthony Fauci was always trust. When President Donald Trump pushed Fauci to the forefront of COVID response policy, it was because he trusted the longtime bureaucratic doctor to recommend the right moves to combat a global pandemic. That trust turned out to be Trump’s biggest first-term blunder. No wonder Joe Biden kept Fauci as the face of the government response long after it was clear he shouldn’t be trusted.
Our team has hit Fauci hard in recent weeks, starting with Rand Paul’s release of Fauci’s diaries, discussing his pathetic evasion before Congress, and offering an overarching summation of his terrible legacy.
Well, here we are with yet more news about a guy we’d rather retire to the ash heap of history.
After Congress held Fauci in contempt for his Fifth Amendment subversion, Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson released a batch of texts from Fauci’s government-issued cellphone on Monday. The sampling of text messages is far from comprehensive, and I want to be careful not to play gotcha. Yet the messages are also entirely in keeping with Fauci’s poor character and deception.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The texts show Fauci having real-time discussions in late January 2021 about the pros and cons of the Covid vaccine for pregnant women with then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who at the time led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Of particular interest are the threads discussing vaccination during pregnancy. “There are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred,” Fauci texted. Furthermore, “Since many people have significant cytokines [sic] storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
In another thread, Fauci actually offered a balanced assessment: “I would say that in any vaccine in which data are lacking in pregnant women one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits. COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy.”
Yet in February 2021, Fauci was publicly claiming there were “no red flags” about vaccinating pregnant women, and declaring “it’s pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated.”
Many Americans would now say that pushing novel COVID vaccines on pregnant women wasn’t necessarily the best idea. Don’t get me wrong — getting COVID was pretty rough, too.
But Fauci and other health officials privately worried and publicly downplayed the risks from the vaccines — including miscarriage, which seems pretty serious to me — while harshly opposing and thoroughly silencing “misinformation.” As epidemiologist Vinay Prasad notes in The Free Press, “There was more uncertainty than officials were willing to let on to the public.” He added, “Fauci’s private texts show that he wrestled with many doubts that he later characterized as misinformation when they were uttered aloud by critics.”
The CDC officially recommended the COVID vax for pregnant women in April 2021. Our Emmy Griffin, who was pregnant during the vax push, wasn’t a fan. And the current Trump administration has nixed that federal recommendation, though the debate rages on.
For what it’s worth, The Washington Post reports, “The CDC states that with more than a million pregnant women vaccinated globally, studies have not shown increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery and more. Health officials have said such past exchanges reflect the revolving nature of the science and debate at the time.”
Of course, The Washington Post has reported a lot of things we couldn’t trust. Forget COVID; it won a Pulitzer Prize for its misleading coverage of the Russia collusion hoax.
The CDC has also said things we can’t entirely trust, which leads me back to that agency.
It became evident within the first year of the pandemic that public health officials like Fauci were not being honest. They were hiding doubts, silencing critics, and pushing a tyrannical government response. It’s the least surprising development of the century to say that, as a result of such deception, people lost faith and trust in government institutions.
Yet CBS’s Margaret Brennan invited National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya on her Sunday show to ask him about an August 2025 shooting at the CDC complex. And by “ask him,” I mean that she sought to blame him, President Trump, and others for pushing “misinformation” about COVID and causing distrust in government agencies that led to violence.
Let me put this another way: The CDC, NIH, and public health officials generally proved themselves untrustworthy. Trump, Bhattacharya, and others pointed it out. To Brennan, that means Trump, et. al., are to blame for a kook with a gun.
Unreal.
Brennan and her Leftmedia ilk are a major reason for all the distrust, too, of course, so it’s no wonder to see her working hard to shift blame when the dear doctor Fauci is under assault by those mean Republicans.
