Meghan McCain Wants Fauci Jailed Over a Text That Shows Science Working
Meghan McCain wants Dr. Anthony Fauci in a jail cell. "PUT FAUCI IN JAIL!!!!" she posted on X Monday, adding in a follow-up: "This is not hyperbole – handcuff, perp walk and put Fauci in a jail cell for the rest of his life."
The trigger was a January 2021 text chain released August 10 by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), drawn from Fauci's government-issued iPhone, which the Department of Health and Human Services turned over on August 5. In the chain, Fauci tells then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and soon-to-be Surgeon General Vivek Murthy: "Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."
That word, theoretically, is doing all the work McCain and the senators would rather you not notice. And there is a second thing worth noticing: five years ago, McCain's loudest complaint about this same vaccine was that she could not get it fast enough.
What the texts actually show
Read the full released thread and you find three of the government's top health officials doing precisely what we pay them to do: privately kicking around every conceivable risk before data existed to resolve it. Walensky called the fever concern "definitely a good point, esp after dose two." Murthy flagged a World Health Organization statement advising against the Moderna vaccine for pregnant women "bc of lack of data."
And in the very same conversation, Fauci laid out the actual state of the evidence: pregnant women were excluded from the original trials, but "following the EUA, a large number (more than 10,000) pregnant women have been vaccinated. No issues have arisen." Any vaccine lacking pregnancy data, he wrote, requires weighing "the potential risks against the benefits."
That is not a confession. It is a risk-assessment meeting conducted over text.
The hypothesis was tested, and it failed
A theoretical concern raised in January 2021 is only scandalous if it was buried or confirmed. It was neither. It was investigated in the open, in the world's most scrutinized medical literature.
The CDC's v-safe pregnancy registry produced preliminary findings in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021. When critics attacked the study's denominator, among them an open letter touted in Johnson's own press release claiming an "82%" miscarriage rate, the journal published a correction and follow-up analysis. Using proper life-table methods on 2,456 women vaccinated before conception or before 20 weeks, researchers found a cumulative spontaneous-abortion risk of 14.1 percent (12.8 percent age-standardized), squarely within the normal background rate of roughly 11 to 16 percent in all pregnancies. PolitiFact debunked the 82-percent arithmetic in November 2021: you cannot count third-trimester vaccine recipients as miscarriage survivors when a first-trimester miscarriage was never possible for them.
The CDC moved to a full recommendation for vaccination in pregnancy in August 2021, after months of accumulating safety data, not before. Its current guidance, reaffirmed in February 2026, states that vaccination during pregnancy "has not been linked to increased health risks for pregnant women or babies," a conclusion now resting on studies covering more than a million pregnancies. Meanwhile, COVID-19 itself demonstrably raised the risk of severe illness, ICU admission, and death for pregnant women, the side of the ledger Fauci's critics never mention.
Yes, on February 3, 2021, nine days after the text, Fauci said publicly that the FDA had found "thus far no red flags" for pregnant women. Johnson's release presents this as a gotcha. But note the hedge in Fauci's own public sentence: "we have to be careful, but thus far." A theoretical mechanism with zero observed cases is not a red flag. Saying so is not a lie; it is the accurate description of the evidence at that moment, delivered with the appropriate caveat.
"I will go any place at any time to get it"
McCain's road to the perp-walk demand deserves its own timeline, because she has held nearly every possible position on this vaccine, and Fauci has been the villain in all of them.
In February 2021, her complaint was speed. "I, Meghan McCain, co-host of The View, don't know when or how I will be able to get a vaccine," she told viewers, adding: "I will go any place at any time to get it." In the same segment she demanded President Biden fire Fauci over the sluggish rollout and his "terribly inconsistent messaging," saying the administration should "remove him and put someone else in place that does understand science."
She went, and she got it. By May 11, 2021, she was telling the same audience, on air: "I'm double vaccinated and life is normal for me at this point." That July she argued Democrats "should give a little credit" to Donald Trump for the vaccine's development. In 2021, the shot was a Republican achievement being distributed too slowly by an incompetent Fauci. In early 2022 she described her own harrowing bout with COVID and her fear of its long-term effects.
The timing of her shots matters to her current argument, so state it precisely: McCain was not pregnant when she was vaccinated. Her first daughter was born in September 2020; she announced her second pregnancy in October 2022. Her two-dose series, by her own on-air account, landed squarely in between, and nothing in her public statements indicates she received any dose during a pregnancy. The theoretical first-trimester question Fauci raised in those January 2021 texts could not, on her own public timeline, have applied to her.
By June 2025, the vaccine she once demanded had become a product line. "If you regret taking the shot, there's hope," she posted, announcing a paid partnership with The Wellness Company to sell its $89.99 "Ultimate Spike Detox," a supplement line designed by vaccine skeptic Dr. Peter McCullough, promo code MCCAIN for 10 percent off. Medical experts were blunt: "There's nothing to detox from," virologist Angela Rasmussen said, "because the vaccines themselves are not toxins." Infectious-disease specialist Dr. William Schaffner called the detox concept "simply not scientifically a valid concept."
Follow the arc: fire Fauci because the vaccine is too slow; take the vaccine; credit Trump for the vaccine; sell an $89.99 regret-detox for the vaccine; jail Fauci over the vaccine. The positions have rotated 180 degrees. The demand that Anthony Fauci be punished is the only fixed point.
Criminalizing deliberation
McCain's fury is beyond misleading. "I am a woman who was pregnant and had a miscarriage during Covid," she wrote alongside her jail demand. Her losses are real, and she has been open about them for years. But the fuller history she has shared matters here, because it points away from the villain she is now naming. Her first miscarriage came in July 2019, which she described in a New York Times op-ed months before COVID-19 existed, let alone a vaccine for it. In a 2025 Substack essay, "Me And My Miscarriages," she wrote about her subsequent losses, which coverage of the essay places in 2019, 2022, and 2024. That is a pattern that began before the pandemic and continued after the emergency ended, which is exactly what the medical literature would predict: miscarriage occurs in more than one in ten pregnancies, often more than once for the same woman, and usually with no villain at all.
That grief deserves sympathy, and nothing in her history makes it less real. But sympathy is not a license for show trials, and it is cruel that political operatives are handing grieving women a culprit the data has ruled out. There is no statute against raising a hypothesis with colleagues. If texting a theoretical risk to the CDC director were a crime, the entire practice of pharmacovigilance would be criminal. The perverse incentive here should worry everyone: punish officials for candid private deliberation, and the next generation of public-health leaders will deliberate less, write down nothing, and share less with the public, the exact opposite of the transparency Johnson and Paul claim to want.
Johnson, whose committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt on August 6, says his investigation "has only just begun." There are 34,000 more texts to mine for out-of-context fragments. Expect more perp-walk demands from celebrities who read the tweet but not the thread.
The record, though, is what it is: a scientist raised a theoretical concern, the system tested it, the concern didn't survive contact with the data, and public guidance followed the evidence. That's not corruption. That's the process working, and demanding a life sentence for it is the actual scandal.
