What happened when I shook my head.
This is a follow-up to my piece on the Fauci texts.
On April 14, 2021, I testified before the Joint Economic Committee at a hearing called “Vaccinations and the Economic Recovery.” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was asking the panel about vaccine passports. He got to who might be shut out of public life, and said, “Right now, women who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant are not recommended to take the vaccine.”
He saw me shake my head.
“Dr. Gounder, I saw you shaking your head when I was asking the question ... And what are the scientific data that back up those views?” he said.
Was he wrong?
Partly.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had not told pregnant women to skip the shot. It had not told them to get it, either. The guidance said pregnant people “may choose to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.” Cruz quoted that line back at me in writing after the hearing. But he made it sound like women were being told to stay away from the shot. Nobody was telling them that.
Drugmakers left pregnant women out of the COVID vaccine trials, and this wasn’t a first. Shields and Lyerly looked at late-stage company trials from 2011 and 2012. They found that 348 of 367 excluded pregnant women. By June 29, 2020, before any COVID vaccine existed, 829 of the 1,282 COVID treatment trials that enrolled people of childbearing age had done the same.
What I told him.
I started to answer. He cut in, “Dr. Gounder, if you could do that quickly so we can move on?”
I said COVID in pregnancy acts like flu in pregnancy. It can be severe. It raises the risk of an early delivery. And “women can be safely vaccinated during pregnancy, when they are trying to get pregnant, and when they are breastfeeding.”
Cruz pushed. “Are there any data or empirical studies you can point to on that, that it is safe for pregnant women? I know there are a lot of women who are concerned about that.”
I said I’d send them after the hearing.
“I would ask you to share that with the committee members,” he said. “I think there would be widespread interest.”
The studies I filed with his committee.
Sen. Cruz filed a formal Question for the Record, quoting CDC's careful wording back at me and asking whether I disagreed.
I wrote that I agreed with the CDC and with Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director at the time, that no safety problems had been found.
Then I listed what we had. Gray et al. on how pregnant and nursing women responded to the vaccine. Mithal et al. on antibodies in cord blood. Perl et al. on antibodies in breast milk. Prabhu et al. and Rottenstreich et al. on antibodies crossing the placenta, preprints then and published since. Villar et al. and Healy on how dangerous COVID itself is in pregnancy.
I cited one more thing, published the week after the hearing. Researchers at CDC and the Food and Drug Administration published Shimabukuro et al. on April 21, 2021. They used v-safe, the v-safe pregnancy registry, and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
So where does 82% come from?
This week Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) released texts from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s government phone. Sen. Cruz then promoted a “Verdict” podcast episode called “Bombshell Data: Fauci Covered up that Covid Vaccine Produced 82% Miscarriage Rate.” He wrote, “We now have the receipts: Dr. Fauci and Pfizer knew the second dose of the COVID vaccine carried an 82% risk of miscarriage for women in their first trimester.”
The 82% came from Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine physician who co-wrote a book calling the COVID vaccine the deadliest in history. Science Feedback reviewed his claim that COVID vaccines killed 350,000 to 400,000 Americans and rated it incorrect. That death toll comes from multiplying reports to the federal side-effect database by an unjustified correction factor.
Dr. Thorp laid out his calculation in written testimony to a Senate subcommittee, citing the paper I sent Sen. Cruz. Of the 827 women in the registry who had finished a pregnancy, 104 had miscarried, and 700 of the 712 live births were women who got the shot in their third trimester. Dr. Thorp took those 700 out and divided 104 by the 127 left. That comes to 81.9%.
The healthy pregnancies were still going.
CDC signed up 3,958 pregnant women for the registry. By the March 30, 2021 cutoff, 827 of them had finished a pregnancy. The other 3,131 had not.
That gap is where the 82% comes from.
A miscarriage ends a pregnancy in days or weeks. A healthy pregnancy runs nine months. So early on, the women who have finished are mostly those who lost a pregnancy. The healthy ones are still carrying, and the registry cannot count them until they deliver.
That is why 700 of the 712 live births came from women vaccinated in the third trimester. They were the only healthy pregnancies far enough along to have ended. When Dr. Thorp removed them, he threw out nearly every finished healthy pregnancy in the registry. What was left was 127 women, and 104 of them had miscarried.
The 12.6% has a milder version of the same problem. It divides by 827, only a fifth of the registry.
The paper’s authors said so themselves: “the majority are ongoing, and a direct comparison of outcomes on the basis of timing of vaccination is needed to define the proportion of spontaneous abortions in this cohort.”
CDC waited for the rest of the pregnancies to finish, then measured risk week by week. In September 2021, among the 2,456 women who got vaccinated before they conceived or before 20 weeks, the risk of miscarriage from 6 to under 20 weeks was 14%. Among pregnancies women know about, it’s estimated that 11% to 22% end in miscarriage. A Norwegian registry of 421,201 pregnancies put it at 13%.
In 2025, researchers ran a more rigorous test, with doctors reviewing each miscarriage one by one. The team compared 296 women who miscarried with 592 who gave birth, and found no link between COVID vaccination and miscarriage.
Whose job was it to study COVID vaccination in pregnant women?
Drugmakers excluded pregnant women from vaccine clinical trials, which is why no trial could provide an answer about COVID vaccine safety in April 2021. Congress saw this coming. The 21st Century Cures Act established a task force on research involving pregnant and nursing women. In September 2018, it sent the Secretary of Health and Human Services 15 recommendations, the first of which was to include pregnant and lactating women in research.
Two years later, the COVID vaccine trials left them out anyway.
The information certainly did not state that "only 127 mothers completed birth); as a result, they're incorrectly claiming that of the 127 live births, 104 were miscarriages. 🤔