SEE IT: Fauci’s Texts About Vax Miscarriage Risk Don’t Line Up With Public Statements

The first batch of text messages released from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government-issued phone is raising more questions about what Fauci privately thought about COVID-19 vaccines, and how that differed from what he expressed to the public during the pandemic.

The messages, released this week by Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY), show Fauci privately discussing concerns about the potential risks of COVID vaccination for pregnant women, including the theoretical possibility of miscarriage.

In January 2021, Fauci communicated with Vivek Murthy, who would soon become surgeon general, and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky about the issue. In one message, Fauci said that a second dose of an mRNA COVID vaccine could “theoretically” be “associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

In another exchange, Murthy expressed his own concerns about the vaccines, telling Fauci, “I’ve been hearing the concern about the mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus as well.” The following day, Murthy flagged an announcement from the World Health Organization advising pregnant women to avoid the Moderna COVID vaccine at the time.

The messages were released just days after the Department of Health and Human Services turned over Fauci’s government-issued phone to the Senate. The phone reportedly contains roughly 34,000 text messages and more than 500 voicemails. Johnson and Paul have indicated that additional material could be released after the senators complete their review. So far, fewer than a dozen of the messages have been made public.

The texts are particularly notable because of how they compare with Fauci’s public messaging about COVID vaccination and pregnancy. Just days after his private discussion about the potential miscarriage risk, Fauci publicly offered a much more reassuring assessment of the vaccines for pregnant women. In one interview about a week later, Fauci stressed multiple times that there are “no red flags” showing adverse effects for pregnant women. He later said that it’s “pretty clear” pregnant women should get vaccinated.

Fauci did not publicly discuss the possibility of miscarriage that he had raised in private, nor did he mention Murthy’s concerns about potential effects on a developing baby.

The text revelations come on the heels of Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries, which were recently made public by Paul. In one diary entry, Fauci described suffering a pulmonary infarction months after receiving a COVID vaccine. Critics say someone publicly urging Americans to receive the vaccines, and shaping mandates, should have been transparent about his health episode.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said the discrepancy between Fauci’s private and public comments helps explain the erosion of trust in public health officials. “It’s shocking to me that he was sharing private thoughts and that, when he was out in public — and he was out in the public A LOT — he didn’t share those private thoughts with the American public,” Bhattacharya told Fox News on Monday.

Folks online flooded social media with backlash, too. Peter Hasson, a former news editor, said he and his wife had to scrape by during the pandemic because his then-pregnant wife refused to be vaccinated, apparently sharing the same private concerns as Fauci and other medical professionals before we had more data.

“My wife was pregnant and in her clinical year of PA school at this time,” Hasson said. “But virtually none of the hospitals or doctors offices in the … area would accept PA students for clinical rotations if they weren’t vaccinated — even if they were pregnant, even if they had the antibodies — because they were following Fauci’s advice.”

“My saint of a wife put our baby daughter first and still didn’t get the shot because she didn’t want to risk anything that might mess with the baby, but we had to spend months and months living out of Airbnbs in various rural small towns across Texas — the only places in the state where hospitals couldn’t afford to turn away help from PA students, vaccinated or not — while eating the rent on our empty apartment at the same time. It was worth it but it literally cost us tens of thousands of dollars while we were a one-income household living on a journalist salary,” Hasson added. “And so now, to see Fauci had the same concerns she did? Infuriating.”

A Senate committee recently voted to hold Fauci in contempt after he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights rather than answer questions before Congress. The contempt referral is currently sitting with the Justice Department for review.

Fauci, though, received a highly controversial preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden on his final day in office. The pardon covers federal offenses Fauci may have committed dating back to 2014, and grants him a full and unconditional pardon for any such offenses.