A video circulating on Valuetainment tells viewers that Anthony Fauci knew the COVID-19 vaccine caused miscarriages. The documentary record it draws on says something narrower, and in places the opposite.
Start with what is true, because the claim is built on a real document. In text messages from late January 2021, released in August 2026 by Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, Fauci did raise a concern about pregnancy. He wrote that reports of fevers or a condition called cytokine storm after a second dose 'theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester' [1]. That is a genuine, privately voiced worry, and it is fair to say so plainly.
The word doing the work in the claim is 'knew.' A theoretical association is not knowledge that something happened, and Fauci's own text drew that line in the same exchange. He noted that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already been vaccinated at that point and that, in his words, 'No issues have arisen' [1]. A person who reports a hypothetical risk alongside an absence of observed harm is not describing a harm he knew about; he is describing the ordinary caution of weighing an unknown.
Running next to the 'Fauci knew' video is a specific number that has traveled on its own: Sen. Ron Johnson's claim of 'an 82% miscarriage rate with women who got the injection in the first or second trimester.' PolitiFact rated that claim False on August 12 [2].
The arithmetic shows how the 82% was manufactured. The New England Journal of Medicine study Johnson cited found '104 miscarriages out of 827 completed pregnancies, a 12.6% miscarriage rate' [2]. Recompute it and the figure holds: 104 divided by 827 is 12.58%. The 82% appears only when most of the study is thrown out. Of those 827 pregnancies, 700 involved women vaccinated in their third trimester, well past the window when miscarriage is possible. Excluding them leaves a denominator of 127 [2]. Divide the same 104 miscarriages by that shrunken 127 and you get 81.9%, which rounds to the 82% Johnson quoted. The numerator never changed; the denominator was cut to inflate the rate.
The fuller data points the other way. A September 2021 follow-up put the cumulative miscarriage risk between 12.8% and 14.1% depending on how it was calculated, inside the typical range for any pregnancy [2]. PolitiFact notes that studies involving more than a million pregnancies worldwide have found no increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, preterm delivery, or birth defects [2].
Nothing in the texts or the studies establishes a causal link between the vaccine and miscarriage.
The steel-man is worth stating one more time so the correction is not mistaken for a denial: Fauci did privately raise a theoretical concern about first-trimester miscarriage. That is a real thing he did. It is a different thing from knowing the vaccine caused miscarriages, which the same texts and the subsequent data do not support.
