Dr. Anthony Fauci was made aware of possible COVID-19 vaccine complications by other senior-level public health officials in early 2021, according to new emails and text messages released by Senate Republicans on Sunday.
Documents released by Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) show Fauci, the 85-year-old former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was informed by leadership at other federal health agencies of both adverse events from the COVID-19 vaccine as well as a possible risk of miscarriage.
The new documents, released Sunday morning, follow a revival of scrutiny of Fauci’s role in steering the pandemic-era policies of the Trump and Biden administrations after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a high-profile Senate hearing on July 29.
Text messages from Fauci’s government-issued cellphone released last week by Johnson and Paul showed Fauci had a conversation in January 2021 with then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the possibility the COVID-19 vaccine could cause miscarriages during early pregnancy.
New text messages show that Fauci followed up on this conversation with the then-director of the NIAID Vaccine Research Center, Dr. John Mascola, confirming that safety studies of the COVID vaccine had not been performed on women in the first trimester of pregnancy.
“Initial Studies avoided vaccination in first trimester due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester,” Mascola texted Fauci on Jan. 25.
It is unclear what initial studies were conducted, as the pre-clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines excluded pregnant women.
Within an hour of receiving the text from Mascola, Fauci texted Murthy and Walensky saying, “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.”
Multiple post-market studies have since confirmed that there is no increased risk of miscarriage following the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. Between 10% and 20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.
Other vaccine complications
Another email between Fauci and then-Acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Janet Woodcock shows Fauci was made aware of potential adverse complications from the COVID-19 vaccine in the spring of 2021 at the height of the mass vaccination campaign.
Johnson and Paul also released an email chain on Sunday from Woodcock to Fauci dated May 2021, in which the then-FDA chief explained she had been contacted by various healthcare professionals regarding an array of symptoms experienced by their patients after taking the COVID-19 vaccine and boosters.
Woodcock said the adverse effect symptoms “do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing,” nor would they be sufficiently detected by the adverse event reporting systems from the CDC.
Amid the Biden administration’s mass vaccination campaign, the FDA chief said many of the side effects would likely breed mistrust if not addressed.
“Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out,” Woodcock said. “But the people’s main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”
Woodcock also said she doubted “for obvious reasons” that the pharmaceutical industry would support investigating possible side effects but “if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared.”
Thousands of other emails released as part of the congressional investigation from both the House and Senate into Fauci’s conduct during the pandemic demonstrate the top infectious disease doctor was highly skeptical of any possible anti-vaccine sentiment at this stage of the pandemic.
After receiving the email from Woodcock, Fauci contacted the National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins to relay the message.
“We cannot ignore her,” Fauci wrote, adding that they should contact Walensky for a CDC opinion.
Paul and Johnson did not release any further messages from this conversation.
Ongoing investigation from Senate GOP
Paul, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, and Johnson, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, have each been pursuing long-running investigations into government conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While Paul’s investigation into Fauci has honed in on Fauci’s potential role in funding research that may have created SARS-CoV-2, Johnson’s investigation has almost solely focused on the side effects of the vaccine.
Johnson routinely uses the term “injection” for the COVID-19 inoculation, saying that it is not a “vaccine” intended to provide immunity.
Fauci rejected Johnson’s request for a private transcribed interview session for PSI.
The former top doctor’s attorney wrote in a letter to Johnson that any effort to compel Fauci to testify again before the committee would be to “impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes.”
The Washington Examiner contacted Fauci’s legal representation for this story.