How bad data fuels MAGA criticism of Fauci and vaccines

“We tell pregnant women don’t even have a glass of wine, and yet we coerced them, convinced them, sometimes mandated them to get an experimental gene therapy as early as the first trimester? This is truly sick.”

This is U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin speaking to Fox News from his home about his investigation into former public health leader Anthony Fauci.

He references a June 2021 New England Journal of Medicine research article about the COVID vaccine’s effect on pregnant women, claiming that research reveals women who got vaccinated in the first or second trimester of pregnancy had a shockingly high 82% miscarriage rate. “And they knew it. They knew it! They’re not that stupid,” the senator exclaims.

Johnson’s revelation comes after renewed media interest in the COVID vaccine’s efficacy following the Senate investigation of Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and was instrumental in the development and release of COVID vaccines.

Johnson’s claims are disturbing. At the same time Fauci was publicly advocating the vaccine, he was privately concerned about the potential for miscarriage in pregnant women. As proof of this, Johnson — along with Senate companion Rand Paul — released a trove of personal correspondence between Fauci and other high-ranking medical officials discussing COVID vaccines and their public perception.

These documents included text messages in which then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy asks Fauci for his understanding on when or if pregnant women should be vaccinated. As part of his response, Fauci says: “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.”

A shocking claim

The central thesis of Johnson’s claim is that a June 2021 research article obfuscated data that revealed the vaccine had an 82% rate of miscarriage. The article on which Johnson bases his claim is “Preliminary Finding of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine led by Tom Shimabukuro, then the deputy director for the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC.

The research study pulled vaccination data from the v-safe after vaccination health checker surveillance system, the v-safe pregnancy registry, and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to determine the safety of mRNA COVID vaccines for pregnant women. Data from the v-safe pregnancy registry — which specifically monitored the participants’ pregnancy post-vaccine — found that, of the 827 participants who had completed pregnancy, 104 had (12.6%) had experienced miscarriage.

While this number seems high, the unfortunate truth is that miscarriage — also termed spontaneous abortion — is significantly more common than most of us realize. One study on the public perceptions of miscarriage found respondents believed, on average, that miscarriage occurred in 5% or less of all pregnancies. The truth is miscarriage is significantly more common. The Lancet reports an estimated 23 million miscarriages occur every year worldwide, with a risk of miscarriage being 15.3% of all known pregnancies.

“Miscarriage is significantly more common than most of us realize.”

U.S.-specific research from the National Survey of Family Growth that included stillbirth and ectopic pregnancy found approximately 20% of pregnancies end in loss of the child. So, in truth, while those on the v-safe pregnancy registry form a limited sample, statistically their pregnancies are in line with larger data sets.

The pregnancies they forgot

Except soon after publication, researchers noticed an oversight. Pregnancy loss generally occurs early in pregnancy, with about 80% of all losses occurring in the first trimester. Once a pregnancy reaches 20 weeks of gestation, less than 0.5% will end in a loss. Put differently, 99.5% of pregnancy losses happen before week 20.

Data from the June 2021 study tracking miscarriage rates among pregnant women who had taken the COVID vaccine did not take this into account. In a letter to the editor published by the New England Journal of Medicine in September 2021, Hong Sun, a medical data scientist based in Belgium, noted that 700 of the 827 with a completed pregnancy received their vaccine while in the third trimester — after the 20-week gestational cutoff for miscarriages. Thus, only 127 completed pregnancies in the study met the definition for miscarriage. Yet, the research reported 104 miscarriages.

This is where Johnson gets his numbers cited in his interview with Fox News. He says, “The proper percentages, 104 divided by 127, an 82% miscarriage rate.” And checking the math, Johnson is correct. He also is relying on two New Zealand doctors — Aleisha Brock and Simon Thornley — who come to this same conclusion, writing in their own analysis of the data for Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law that “our re-analysis indicates a cumulative incidence of spontaneous abortion 7 to 8 times higher than the original authors’ results.”

If true, this is exceptionally alarming. The best-case scenario is that some of the world’s best scientists missed a critical distinction in their data analysis. The worst case is that the data was purposely obfuscated to present the COVID vaccine as safe.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate, James Thorp asked, “How could such flaws have gone unnoticed by the (New England Journal of Medicine) editorial staff and peer reviewers — unless intentionally overlooked?”

Thorp’s contention, shared by many conservatives, is that Fauci and others knew the vaccine was unsafe for pregnant women and caused miscarriages but promoted it anyway.

But wait, there’s more

However, there’s another twist to this. Science, Public Health Policy and the Law lacks all hallmarks of a legitimate scientific publication. Instead, the journal has a clear anti-vaccine bias with its founder and board members known to have spread vaccine misinformation. More recently, the journal has been at the front of the Trump administration’s attempt to connect vaccines with autism. It’s unsurprising, then, that they failed to notice a critical mistake in Thornley and Brock’s calculations.

What Thornley and Brock failed to take into consideration is the number of women who were still pregnant at the time of the article’s publication. In the original data, there were 127 pregnant women who were vaccinated before the 20-week mark and had completed their pregnancy. Thornley and Brock narrow the data to this number, noting that 104 of these 127 completed pregnancies were miscarried.

What Thornley and Brock have forgotten about are all the women who were still pregnant. They are working with incomplete data. In fact, because the study lasted only 11 weeks (Dec. 14, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021), it is impossible to have data on full-term pregnancies from women vaccinated prior to 20 weeks’ gestation. At most, women who were less than 20 weeks pregnant at the beginning of the study would be 31 weeks pregnant at its conclusion.

Using data from the study, we can determine there were 127 women vaccinated prior to 20 weeks who, by the end of the study, had completed their pregnancy. Of those 127, 104 suffered a miscarriage, 12 had premature live births, 10 induced abortion or had ectopic pregnancies, and one suffered a stillbirth. The rest of the women vaccinated in the first trimester were still pregnant.

An analogy

Let me attempt an analogy. Imagine that 100 students begin a four-year college program. At the end of the third year, we check on everyone’s progress. Eight students have dropped out. Two kids took summer semesters and graduated early. The remaining 90 students are beginning their senior year.

Now imagine we want to evaluate the class’s graduation rate, so we analyze the cohort of students who have “completed” their college experience. That cohort is 10 students: the eight who dropped out and the two who graduated early. We then conclude that 80% of students who started the program fail to graduate.

It’s accurate in the sense that it’s a current snapshot of reality, but it’s not indicative of what the overall rate will be. Ninety students are still working toward graduation. When the entire cohort is complete, less than 10% of the students will fail to graduate.

That’s the essential problem with Thornley and Brock looking only at “completed” pregnancies. A miscarriage produces a “completed” pregnancy early, making it eligible for inclusion in their analysis. But a healthy pregnancy that was still ongoing when the data were collected could not be included. The result is that their analysis disproportionately captures pregnancies that ended early while ignoring ongoing, healthy pregnancies. Their data analysis is fundamentally flawed.

“Their data analysis is fundamentally flawed.”

So fundamentally flawed that, shortly after the article’s original publication in 2021, Thornley retracted the article, telling a New Zealand publication, “I have decided to withdraw it.” However, five years later, the article is still widely cited by others now repeating his debunked and retracted claims before Congress.

What the full data reveal

In the five years since the New England Journal of Medicine’s initial research and Science, Public Health Policy and the Law’s flawed reanalysis, other research studies have affirmed that there is no increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, preterm delivery or birth defects.

Just a few months ago, in March 2026, a study published in the journal Vaccine analyzed the complete data from the COVID vaccine pregnancy registry. This data tracked the pregnancy outcomes of 12,097 women who received the vaccine before 20 weeks’ gestation. The researchers found the cumulative risk of miscarriage was 13.5% — no increase at all to the risk of miscarriage in general.

The COVID-19 vaccine was and is safe. Yet, based on flawed and retracted data, the Trump administration continues to push an untrue narrative that it is not. Ron Johnson insinuates that Fauci pushed an unsafe vaccine for political purposes. He was wrong five years ago and he is wrong today.

 

Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.

 

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