Anthony Fauci Was Allowed To Ask Questions American Women Could Not

Anthony Fauci was worried that the COVID vaccine could potentially cause miscarriages. He just didn’t tell American women. Newly released text messages from Fauci’s government-issued phone show that in January 2021, as the vaccines were being rolled out across the country, Fauci privately raised concerns about pregnant women receiving them. “Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the 2nd dose,” Fauci wrote to then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”  Walensky responded: “Definitely a good point.” A good point indeed.

Days later, Fauci appeared publicly and told Americans that he had no major concerns involving pregnant women. CDC Director Walensky noted without qualification in August 2021, “The vaccines are safe and effective” in pregnancy. Privately, they mused about theoretical miscarriages, while publicly they messaged unconditional confidence and safety in the vaccines.

The question is not whether Fauci’s theoretical concern ultimately proved correct. The question is why a concern serious enough to discuss privately with the CDC director and future surgeon general was not communicated with equal specificity to pregnant women being asked to make an irreversible medical decision in the absence of pregnancy trial data. Pregnant women were excluded from the original preauthorization COVID vaccine trials. The vaccines had just been introduced. There was almost no longitudinal data because, by definition, there couldn’t be. Questions specific to pregnancy and the female reproductive system remained unanswered.  But a physician-scientist committed to informed consent would have been equally candid about the limits of what we knew and about the specific risks officials themselves were still considering.

Masks, schools, vaccines, children, the elderly, how far apart we should stand (six feet – not five or seven), where we should gather, and what we should put on our faces when we do – every COVID question had an answer, and the answer was usually Dr. Fauci.

And as the pandemic wore on, the spry, sometimes cantankerous government doctor who sparred with skeptical members of Congress became something else entirely: America’s high priest of science.

During a 2021 interview, Fauci argued that attacks on him amounted to attacks on science because, in his telling, “I represent science.”  Like the Bishop of Rome speaking ex cathedra, he seemed to believe that his pronouncements were beyond question.  And therefore, questions about his conclusions constituted an attack not just on him, but on the very concept of science itself – a bold if not egotistical claim.

Science cannot be embodied by any one person. The scientific method, which has brought humanity so many extraordinary advances, is actually anchored in the scientist’s fallibility. We test, we randomize, we replicate, and we invite others to prove us wrong.

Good science has always begun with humility. Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman noted, “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” The pandemic provided no shortage of opportunities for public-health officials to fool themselves. Pronouncements about the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety in January were walked back in July as it became clear they did not prevent transmission and were associated with serious side effects. After the vaccines became widely available, women anecdotally noted irregular periods and bleeding, and some noted miscarriages and birth defects.

They often ended up in their physicians’ office asking, “Could this have something to do with the vaccine I just received?” That question should have sparked intense, apolitical scientific curiosity. Instead, women were asking it in an environment where skepticism itself had become suspect. Question the prevailing recommendation, and you could quickly find yourself branded “anti-science.”

Whether and to what degree the COVID vaccine itself, when given in the first trimester, increased miscarriage rates and birth defects was a very important question and a particularly thorny one to answer definitively, as many pregnancy-related questions are. But the concept of informed consent exists for exactly this purpose. The claim of an 82% miscarriage rate after close analysis appears to be based on a flawed assumption, but this does not absolve the vaccine manufacturers and the CDC.

Pfizer’s early postmarketing safety report on April 30, 2021 that showed an unverifiable miscarriage signal should have prompted immediate and somber investigation. An April 2021 NEJM study led by CDC researcher Tom Shimabukuro showed a relatively low/normal miscarriage rate, and it had to be revised because skeptics noted the methodology did not appropriately count pregnancies and miscarriages. The authors agreed and revised the number, increasing the rate (14.1%), but these were in keeping with “acceptable” miscarriage rates.  These were two signals, neither one reassuring. But the messaging from the public health gurus was full steam ahead when it should have been, “Discuss the risks with your doctor.”

And now there is an even more infuriating wrinkle. Sen. Eric Schmitt, who brought Missouri v. Biden while serving as Missouri’s attorney general, says discovery in the case revealed that the Biden CDC was sending daily emails to Facebook demanding censorship of posts raising concerns specifically about the COVID vaccine’s impact on pregnant women.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — the Murthy in Murthy v. Missouri — was on the very text chain in which Fauci raised the theoretical miscarriage concern. You could hardly script the irony better. The same public-health establishment that privately understood there were unanswered questions was helping create a public environment in which raising those questions could get Americans labeled and even canceled as purveyors of “misinformation.” Anthony Fauci was allowed to ask that question. American women were not.

Doctors are most dangerous when they believe they cannot be wrong.  They need humility and should not tell their patients their experience cannot be real because it hasn’t yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. When the patient is pregnant, our obligation to humility becomes even greater. Pregnant women were making decisions not only about themselves but about their unborn children. They deserved every piece of information available to them. They deserved to know what had been studied. They deserved to know what had not. They deserved to know what risks officials were considering, even if those risks were only theoretical. Most importantly, they deserved the dignity of making the decision themselves, a true informed consent, which most did not receive.

Feynman, writing in 1986 after the Challenger disaster, noted: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”  Our public health apparatus did prioritize public relations and narrative control over reality. Disagreement with the vaccine narrative became something akin to heresy, and women know where that road leads. Fauci’s transformation from government physician to cultural icon allowed the media, and thus the general public, to conflate his judgment with settled science itself, rather than recognizing that he was an expert who was still as fallible as any other human.

Pregnant women raised their hands and said, “Something isn’t right here,” and we, as physicians, had a duty to help them get to the bottom of it. Many physicians failed that test because they chose to tow the company line rather than address difficult questions. Most of all, American women deserved to know that behind closed doors, the country’s most famous doctor had questions, too.

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Dr. Benjamin Chacko is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the father of two sons.