The Fauci Texts Show Science Working. The NIH Director Calls That 'Shocking'

On Monday, Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson released 11 text messages — out of more than 34,000 recovered from Dr. Anthony Fauci's government phone — and the administration's messaging apparatus swung into action. By Tuesday evening, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya was on NewsNation's "Elizabeth Vargas Reports" declaring the messages "kind of shocking, actually," and calling Fauci "very irresponsible."

Here is what the texts actually show.

A scientist doing his job

In late January 2021, then-Surgeon General nominee Vivek Murthy asked Fauci and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky whether any data suggested pregnant women should be vaccinated earlier or later in pregnancy. Walensky noted the CDC was tracking side effects in pregnant women through its V-safe monitoring system. Fauci replied that there was "no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred."

He then raised a possibility worth watching: because some people experienced fevers and cytokine responses after the second dose, this "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester." A day later, he added the essential context: "in any vaccine in which data are lacking in pregnant women one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits," noting that COVID-19 "can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy" and that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated with "no issues." A week later, he texted that the FDA had found no red flags among pregnant women in the vaccine trials.

That is the entire scandal: a scientist flagging a theoretical risk to colleagues, checking it against emerging data, and updating his assessment within days. It is what internal deliberation is supposed to look like. And the science settled the question long ago — a large 2022 study in Nature Communications found no increased risk of miscarriage after COVID-19 vaccination, and CDC data covering more than a million pregnant women found vaccination "did not increase health risks for pregnant women or their babies." Seven months after the text exchange, once that data existed, the CDC formally recommended vaccination in pregnancy.

The messenger is the message

So why is the director of the National Institutes of Health — the nation's premier biomedical research agency — on cable news characterizing routine risk-benefit deliberation as a shocking revelation?

Bhattacharya's record offers an answer. A co-author of the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which urged letting the virus spread among the young while "protecting" the vulnerable, he spent the pandemic as one of Fauci's most prominent critics. President Trump nominated him to lead NIH weeks after the 2024 election; the Senate confirmed him on a 53-47 party-line vote. Since February he has also served as acting director of the CDC. He was not chosen despite his hostility to the public health establishment Fauci personified — he was chosen because of it.

His NewsNation appearance followed the script. Fauci, he said, was "essentially telling the public that it was safe for pregnant women to take it when he didn't know that." But that is not what the record shows. In January 2021, the CDC's public position was that pregnant women could choose to be vaccinated in consultation with their doctors — precisely because trial data was limited — while officials gathered safety data through V-safe. The texts show Fauci saying privately almost exactly what officials were saying publicly: data was incomplete, benefits likely outweighed risks, and monitoring was underway. There is no gap between the private texts and the public posture. The gap exists only in the retelling.

A distraction with a purpose

The timing is not subtle. The texts landed as part of a sustained, multi-front campaign: Paul's office released Fauci's private diary entries last month; HHS handed a copy of Fauci's phone to Paul's Senate subcommittee; Fauci was hauled before that subcommittee in July, invoked the Fifth Amendment, and was held in contempt by committee vote. Paul and Johnson promise more releases from the trove of 34,000 messages — selected, of course, by the offices doing the releasing.

Eleven texts out of 34,000 is a curation, not a disclosure. And enlisting the sitting NIH director to validate the curation on prime-time cable converts a political operation into something wearing the costume of scientific authority.

Meanwhile, the substantive record runs the other direction. It was this administration's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped the CDC's COVID vaccine recommendation for pregnant women last year — against the continuing advice of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which still recommends vaccination based on the same mountain of safety data the released texts anticipated.

Voters can judge for themselves which is more troubling: a scientist who privately raised a theoretical concern and resolved it with data within days, or a research agency director who describes that process as "shocking" on television while the department he serves rolls back the recommendation the data supports. One of these is how science works. The other is how distraction works.

This is an opinion piece. All quoted material is drawn from the released text messages and contemporaneous news coverage cited below.