Newly surfaced text messages between Dr. Anthony Fauci, former CDC director Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are renewing scrutiny of what public health officials knew privately about vaccine risks to pregnant women even as they offered unqualified public assurances, Dan Proft said on Chicago’s Morning Answer, before turning to Curtis Hill, senior adviser with the Free Enterprise Project, ambassador with the Project 21 Black Leadership Network and former Indiana Attorney General, for reaction.
Proft laid out the timeline drawn from roughly 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails recovered through the efforts of Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul. In January of 2021, Fauci wrote to Walensky and Murthy that a significant number of people were experiencing cytokine storms after the second vaccine dose, and that this could theoretically be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester. Walensky responded that it was a good point worth raising, particularly after the second dose. Yet in public appearances during the same period, Walensky told audiences there was no bad time to get vaccinated, whether before pregnancy, during it or after delivery. Weeks later, Fauci told a JAMA livestream that the FDA had found no red flags regarding pregnant women and the vaccine, and months after that he said tens of thousands of pregnant women tracked by the CDC showed no increase in adverse outcomes compared with the unvaccinated, calling it clear that pregnant women should get the shot.
Proft traced the broader timeline as well. The Biden administration urged pregnant women to get vaccinated in April of 2021. A CDC study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June of that year found the vaccine safe for pregnant women but noted its comparison groups were not directly comparable and called for further study. An OB-GYN critiquing that study in January of 2022 argued that excluding women in their third trimester understated the true miscarriage rate. And a 2023 account from Tracy Beth Hoeg, written before she joined the FDA, noted that Pfizer halted its own study into the question after enrolling only a fraction of the pregnant women it had planned to include, even though the company’s own data showed 5.1 percent of infants born to vaccinated mothers had adverse events of special interest, compared with 1.3 percent in the study’s control arm.
Hill said the revelations, while striking, did not surprise him, describing a consistent pattern in which Fauci stayed rigidly on message throughout the pandemic, from mask guidance onward, while privately holding a different view than the one he presented publicly. Hill said Americans looked to Fauci for leadership during one of the most difficult periods in a generation and instead received what he characterized as dishonesty. Proft noted that Murthy’s texts went further still, expressing concern about mRNA vaccines potentially causing mutations in developing fetuses, and argued that had officials shown more humility publicly about what was and was not known, the reaction might have been different. Instead, he said, people who raised the same concerns, especially pregnant women, were dismissed as vaccine deniers. Proft also cited Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s contention that the Biden administration pressured social media platforms to suppress discussion of the vaccine’s effects on pregnant women specifically, which Hill described as part of a broader effort to limit what people could learn in making decisions for themselves and their children.
Asked about the prospect of state-level criminal exposure now that Fauci holds a federal pardon that would not cover state offenses, with officials including Florida’s attorney general and Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville reportedly examining the question, Hill said building a case would be difficult. State criminal statutes require specific, provable elements, he said, and while he believes the evidence increasingly points to a pattern of misleading the public that caused injuries and in some cases deaths, prosecutors would still need to connect particular actions Fauci took to specific harms suffered within their state, a difficult evidentiary bridge to build given likely defenses centered on evolving pandemic-era data. Hill called the federal pardon itself unforgivable, saying it was designed to wall off potential accountability before any wrongdoing had been established, and argued that if nothing else comes of the current scrutiny, Congress should act to limit the use of preemptive pardons issued without evidence of actual misconduct.