Remember When Everyone Who Got COVID Vaccine Had A Miscarriage? EVEN THE MEN?
Of course not, because that never happened.
While Donald Trump is busy making up executive orders that could lead to more children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases, his fellow travelers in the war on public health are resurrecting some old pandemic-era disinformation in their campaign to put Dr. Anthony Fauci in jail forever for imaginary crimes.
As a preventative measure, let’s begin by boosting your mental immune system with some facts: Study after study has shown that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective during pregnancy and for nursing mothers, especially since the COVID virus itself can double or triple the risk of miscarriage. The rate of miscarriages among vaccinated women is between 10 percent and 14 percent, which matches the rate of miscarriage among the general population before the pandemic and the vaccine.
Even the RFK Jr.-weakened Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website says that vaccination “offers the greatest benefit if you are at higher risk for severe illness, including if you are pregnant.” It also notes that getting COVID during pregnancy increases the risk of “complications that can affect your health and the health of your baby.”
Further, the website notes that COVID vaccination “has not been linked to increased health risks for pregnant women or babies. It helps reduce the risk for severe illness from COVID-19,” and that there’s no association between the vaccines and fertility problems for men or for women.
Pretty reassuring, but it’s not very helpful when you’re trying to whip up MAGA panic about vaccines, which is why Republican Senators Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) are doing all they can to suggest that Dr. Anthony Fauci was part of a conspiracy to tell Americans the vaccines were safe even though he had “privately warned of miscarriage risk linked to COVID vaccine,” as a panicky article in Monday’s New York Post put it.
No, that didn’t happen. The January 2021 text messages between Fauci and two other top health officials, former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, discussed the state of research at that early stage of the vaccine rollout, when there were still a lot of unanswered question about the efficacy of the vaccine in pregnant patients. At the time, the CDC had identified pregnant women as being at high risk from complications of COVID, but because clinical trials usually exclude pregnant patients, there wasn’t much data on the vaccines yet.
Murthy texted Fauci and Walensky to ask if they knew of “any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs. late in pregnancy could be preferred,” and after some discussion about the state of the research then, which didn’t indicate any heightened risk from the vaccines, Fauci wrote that, considering reports of some side effects after the second dose of the vaccines, “this could theoretically be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
Theoretically, not a demonstrated risk. Subsequent research has shown, as we say, that the disease-preventing benefits of the vaccines far outweigh any potential risks, and that there’s no increased rate of miscarriage from getting the COVID jab. (OK, but aren’t the babies more likely to be magnetic, so you can use them to stick your shopping list on the fridge door?) (No. That was a joke.)
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So no, Fauci and the others definitely did not privately admit the vaccines were risky while telling the public they were safe, but that didn’t prevent the rightwing panic machine from kicking into high gear. Kate Johnson, the spouse of rightwing influencer Benny Johnson, sputtered that the health officials “knew they were harming and killing babies,” and NewsNation host Katie Pavlich insisted that the vaccines were in effect an “abortion shot” since according to an undead rightwing myth, 82 percent of all pregnant women who got the vaccine supposedly had a miscarriage. (This is total bullshit based on laughably bad math.)
Meghan McCain shouted “PUT FAUCI IN JAIL,” adding that “I am a woman who was pregnant and had a miscarriage during Covid.” Perhaps the vaccines also included a time machine, since Ms. McCain apparently forgot that her miscarriage — which was tragic, yes — occurred in 2019. She wrote a moving op-ed about it for the New York Times, even. She did get pregnant again during the pandemic, and had a healthy baby in September 2020 — Mazel tov! And that too was months before the vaccine was available.
Now, let’s dig into that “82 percent” claim, which was echoed by actual elected weirdo Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Michigan) on Fox News Tuesday night, ensuring that everyone on the far right now thinks it’s real. The bogus claim was debunked in detail back in 2021 by Dr. Jen Gunter, who pointed out that the cranks who originally promulgated it simply fudged the numbers to create an impossibly high rate of miscarriages. A review of completed pregnancies (those ending in live birth, miscarriage, abortion, ectopic pregnancy, or stillbirth) included 827 vaccinated people, of whom 712 had live births, congratulations. The rate of miscarriages (104 out of 827) was a pretty typical 12.6 percent, sorry for your loss.
But the antivax geniuses — Gunter called them “the armchair epidemiologists” — who fudged the stats decided to exclude all 700 pregnancies in which the patient got the vaccine in their third trimester and had live births, possibly with the warped logic that “miscarriages” are the loss of a fetus before 20 weeks, so why count those people who got the jab late? That’s where the deceptive math comes in, because they didn’t change the denominator, so suddenly “instead of the miscarriage rate being 104/827 it is now 104/127 or 82%. But you can’t do that because the data set is looking at all pregnancy outcomes.”
In one of the more surprising turns in the great discussion of all this, one of the worst people we know of, mis- and disinformation peddler Alex Berenson, pointed out the complete absurdity of the “82 percent” figure (Rolling Stone link):
Not that any of the facts matter. Rightwingers on Twitter are losing their fucking minds about how no women who’ve had the COVID vaccine can ever carry a baby to term, and women who have done exactly that are telling them that they have healthy, happy children. Or at least they say they had healthy happy children. They might all be parents of alien-human hybrid lizard babies, can you prove they aren’t?
[Rolling Stone / NewsGuard / Bulwark / The Vagenda (2021) / CDC]
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Boy, that bunch will do just about anything to try to deflect from their own failures to safeguard the public health during COVID. And during now, that too. Diarrhea measles, anyone?
But really, if they cared about the welfare of babies and children, they'd do stuff like support child care and schools, and they HATE that. This performative outrage is way easier.
Pushing bad health info that can get people killed should be the modern equivalent of yelling " fire" in a crowded theater.