Another day, another false claim going viral on the internet. But this time, it’s largely conservatives falling for it — and it’s a matter of life and death.
On Monday, a pair of Republican senators released documents revealing that Dr. Anthony Fauci had privately raised hypothetical concerns about whether the COVID-19 vaccine could pose a risk to pregnant women. This release sparked widespread conversation about whether Fauci’s public statements about the COVID-19 vaccine lined up with his private concerns. But aside from that legitimate debate, another document included in this release went viral and spread a totally false claim to millions of people.
The primary purveyor of this false claim was NewsNation host and conservative journalist Katie Pavlich, who posted on X that went on to receive more than 5 million views, “The mandated and doctor recommended COVID-19 shot for pregnant women was effectively an abortion shot according to new documents just released by Senators Johnson and Paul.” (Emphasis added.)
Quoting from a screenshot presented with little context, Pavlich echoed the claim presented in it that “raw data revealed an 82% miscarriage rate in women vaccinated during the first trimester.”
This claim — that this new document release somehow proved the COVID-19 vaccine was like an abortion shot for pregnant women and caused 82% of pregnant women who received it during the first trimester to miscarry — quickly went viral on right-wing X and led to widespread outrage. It was uncritically shared by influencers like Liz Wheeler, Isabel Brown, and Nick Sortor.
There’s just one problem: It’s not true. Oh, and it’s not even new.
The “newly released” document Pavlich shared is actually just the congressional testimony of one fringe doctor, which he gave back in 2022 and has been publicly available for years. The screenshot she shared that many think “proves” this claim is actually just his incorrect reanalysis of data publicly published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021. The authors of that data analysis did not conclude that there was any additional miscarriage risk associated with pregnant women taking the COVID-19 vaccine. He arrived at this 82% figure by recalculating their data in a way that makes no sense because it definitionally excludes those many hundreds of first-trimester vaccinated women studied whose pregnancies were still ongoing when the preliminary analysis was done.
As the community note eventually attached to Pavlich’s tweet explains, “The 82% miscarriage figure uses an invalid denominator. The [New England Journal of Medicine] study noted it could not calculate miscarriage risk for early-exposure participants because 905 of 1,224 lacked follow-up data. A later analysis of the same registry found a 14.1% rate, within historical norms.”
Oops.
But this claim never made sense even at face value. If the COVID-19 vaccine, whatever else one thinks of it, actually caused more than 80% of pregnant women vaccinated in the first trimester to miscarry, that would’ve led to a huge increase in miscarriages and a noticeable plummet in the birth rate that simply never showed up in general statistics.
Even many high-profile critics of the COVID-19 vaccine, such as journalist Alex Berenson, rejected this bizarre assertion. He wrote on X in response to Pavlich’s viral post, “This is fiction. If it were true the birthrate in mRNA countries would have dropped to near zero in 2021 and 2022. Please don’t lie about this, it’s too important. I say this as the most serious critic of the mRNAs since 2021.”
“Huge national-level databases show no impact on miscarriages or newborn health,” Berenson added. “I looked hard. It’s not there.“
Need even more proof?
Well, the Trump-run Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is overseen by notorious vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still to this day notes on its website that as far as COVID-19 vaccines are concerned, “studies have shown no increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery, stillbirth, or birth defects.” (Emphasis added.)
HOSPITAL PRICE TRANSPARENCY IS GOOD POLITICS – AND GOOD POLICY
It’s simply not true. Yet, because of reckless right-wing journalists and pundits, millions of people now wrongly believe that COVID-19 vaccines cause miscarriages. Even more tragically, countless understandably heartbroken women who took the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant and then later lost their baby to miscarriage now incorrectly believe it happened because of something they did, wrongly blaming either themselves or their doctors.
And all this only muddies the waters on the very legitimate concerns about the mandating of COVID-19 vaccines and the failures of the public health establishment during the pandemic. It’s a heartbreaking, demoralizing saga that should serve as a painful reminder as to why it’s so important to fact-check and verify claims before running with them. But most of the misled people will never even realize they were told such reckless lies.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.