A pair of congressional investigations led by Republican senators made public an initial collection of text message exchanges from a government-issued mobile phone used by Dr. Anthony Fauci. The phone, produced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on August 5, 2026, contains more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, according to the offices of Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. The released documents shed light on real-time pandemic responses and internal deliberations among federal health leaders during the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
January 2021 Text Threads and Early Pregnancy Concerns
Among the released documents is a text chain dated January 25–26, 2021, involving Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and Dr. Vivek Murthy. The conversation began when Murthy reached out to Fauci and Walensky to ask if there was any data or theoretical reason to prefer vaccinating early versus late in pregnancy, noting he had been advising pregnant individuals that clinical trials showed no concerning adverse outcomes despite limited pregnant participants.
Walensky responded that the situation was largely a data-free environment, explaining that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recently established a V-safe pregnancy registry that had enrolled over 15,000 pregnant women. Fauci agreed with that assessment regarding the lack of data favoring early versus late vaccination, noting a public misperception that mRNA vaccines could alter genetic material that heightened anxiety when extended to an early developing fetus.
“Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Walensky replied that it was definitely a good point, esp after dose two
while Murthy also acknowledged the observation as a really good point regarding the cytokine storm following the second dose.
Navigating Public Confidence and World Health Organization Guidance
The following day, on January 26, 2021, Murthy alerted the group to a World Health Organization feature story advising against the use of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant individuals due to insufficient clinical data. Murthy expressed concern that the advisory could be potentially damaging to public confidence among pregnant women. In response, Fauci advised pointing out that post-authorization data from over 10,000 vaccinated pregnant women had raised no safety flags, and that animal toxicity studies showed no red flags. He emphasized that advisory and regulatory bodies permitted informed choice while balancing vaccine risks against the known dangers of severe COVID-19 infection during pregnancy. Walensky closed the thread by offering to flag the WHO recommendation during an upcoming Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting scheduled for the following day.
Subsequent Federal Recommendations and Public Statements
In the months and years following the initial January 2021 exchanges, federal health officials issued definitive public recommendations urging pregnant individuals to receive the vaccine. On February 3, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the FDA had found no red flags regarding pregnant women. Later that year, on August 30, 2021, Fauci pointed to data from tens of thousands of pregnant women followed by the CDC, asserting that there was no indication of any increase in adverse issues compared to unvaccinated pregnant women. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky issued a health alert on September 29, 2021, stating that the CDC strongly recommended vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits outweighed potential risks. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy echoed those statements on February 1, 2022, declaring that data points showed vaccines were safe during various stages before and during pregnancy.
Scientific Debate and Review of Published Literature
The release of the phone records also highlights ongoing academic debates concerning safety data analyses published in medical journals. On January 12, 2022, Dr. James A. Thorp, an OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist, published an open letter criticizing a paper by Shimabukuro et al. published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 17, 2021. Thorp argued that because 700 of the 827 pregnant women in the study received their injection in the third trimester after 28 weeks, those participants should be excluded from the denominator used to calculate spontaneous abortion rates occurring before 20 weeks.
