Republican Senators Johnson and Paul released documents including Fauci's private concerns about COVID vaccines and pregnancy, prompting conservative host Katie Pavlich to claim the vaccine was 'effectively an abortion shot,' citing an 82% first-trimester miscarriage rate. The post, viewed over 5 million times and amplified by influencers including Liz Wheeler and Nick Sortor, was based on a fringe doctor's 2022 congressional testimony misreading 2021 New England Journal of Medicine data.
The 82% figure results from an invalid denominator that excludes hundreds of women whose pregnancies were still ongoing when the preliminary data was collected; a later analysis of the same registry found a 14.1% miscarriage rate, within historical norms. Even prominent vaccine critic Alex Berenson rejected the claim, noting birth rates never crashed as the figure would imply, and the Trump-run CDC's website still states studies show no increased miscarriage risk.
The false claim has left vaccinated women who later miscarried wrongly blaming themselves, while muddying legitimate debate over COVID vaccine mandates and public health failures during the pandemic.
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