Pregnancy is a season of life that often asks a woman to make peace with uncertainty. She is told to avoid certain cheeses, to be careful around the hospital, to listen to a body that is suddenly changing in unfamiliar ways. For millions of women who were pregnant or trying to become pregnant during the Covid-19 pandemic, those everyday worries were multiplied by vaccine appointments, missed births, and alarming waves of infection. Now the same emotional machinery is being activated again by another wave of dangerous misinformation. It began when Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released old text messages from Dr. Anthony Fauci, and social media turned some tired phrases into a sensational headline: Covid vaccines cause an 82% chance of miscarriage. The number was claimed in a post that was even temporarily shared by Sen. Ted Cruz before being deleted. For a pregnant woman scrolling through her feed, reading something like that can feel like everything has been turned upside down. But the headline doesn’t come close to reality. As Dr. Kevin Ault, an ob/gyn and president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, put it, “This is a well-studied area. We knew this in 2021, that there wasn’t an increased risk, and now we have five years more of data. So it’s hard to believe we would miss a factor-of-8 increase in miscarriages. ” The “82%” claim is not a hidden truth that doctors have been hiding; it is old data being twisted in a new political season, and the cost of that rumor is falling hardest on people who are already vulnerable.
To understand how this rumor got started, it helps to go back to one early morning in January 2021, a year when the vaccines were still rolled out. In a private text that was later retrieved from Dr. Fauci’s government phone, Fauci made a tentative comment about the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, saying that “theoretically” it “could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” Related to a scientist, the word “theoretically” is a red flag that means “we do not know yet,” not “we know it is true. It is the beginning of inquiry, not a proof. In the same release, Sen. Johnson also quoted Fauci criticizing a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021. But a critic is not safety data. In the early months of vaccine rollout, scientists did not have enough pregnant women in the clinical trials to have certain certainty about every clinical side effect, so health authorities did what they had always done: they watched carefully, collected numbers, corrected mistakes, and made recommendations from a larger body of evidence. And after more time, more studies and millions of pregnancies, the available evidence is reassuring. That is not a sign that science is hiding from truth, but the opposite. Yet Fox’s repeated private messages, often framed as “investigation,” can distract, because people listen to judicial language more than scientific context. And in a pregnant mother’s life, what matters is the answer that has emerged with extreme clarity: the vaccines have never been shown to increase the risk of miscarriage.
The heart of the controversy is a real study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021. The researchers tried to track the outcomes of almost 4,000 women who received the Covid vaccine in the early months of the vaccination campaign, using a vaccine safety monitoring system. Among that group, 827 women had what the researchers called a “completed pregnancy” at the time the data was analyzed. Of those 827 pregnancies, 712 resulted in live birth, 104 ended in spontaneous abortion, and 11 had other outcomes. When those 104 events were calculated as a fraction of the 827, the initial calculation showed a miscarriage rate of 12.6%. That is not alarming; the average rate of miscarriage in the general population is generally somewhere between 10% and 20%, according to the Mayo Clinic. But in September 20211, the journal issued a correction. The correction did not say that vaccines cause miscarriages; it said there was not enough data to calculate a true risk estimate from this particular study. Why? Because having a completed pregnancy at that time meant you were vaccinated quite late in the pregnancy. The “denominator” simply didn’t capture most women in the study, since they had not completed their pregnancies yet. If you follow people for only a short amount of time, you cannot know whether their pregnancies will end in a live birth or not. The researchers noted 700 of the 827 completed pregnancies had been vaccinated third trimester, and because spontaneous abortion occurs earlier in pregnancy, those third-trimester pregnancies should not be in the same risk category. They wrote that “any risk estimate would need to account for gestational week-specific risk” and that “no denominator was available to calculate a risk estimate for spontaneous abortions.” In other words, their initial number was not being interpreted as a hazard rate; it was correcting a weight, not a verdict.
But the story did not end with a correction. Instead, in the minds of politicians and critics, a correction became a confession, and the failings of the study became raw material for false calculations. They took the 104 miscarriages from the original group and tried to create a new denominator by excluding those third-trimester pregnancies. Since 700 of the 827 completed pregnancies were in the third trimester when vaccinated, that left 127 completed pregnancies. When you divide 104 by 127, you get about 82%. And that is the terrifying number that spread across social media and even briefly awaited the Twitter feed of a senator. This false math confuses a slice of data with a true risk. The 127 pregnancies in the new denominator were not the only pregnancies at risk; they were just a subgroup of those who had completed pregnancy by the time of analysis. The other scientists and pregnant women in the larger group of nearly 4,000 were still waiting. The denominator should have included everyone who was at risk for miscarriage during the relevant window, not only women whose pregnancies and outcomes had already happened to be recorded. Overlooking that basic principle of epidemiology could make any diet look terribly dangerous. An estimate that depends on a biased, tiny slice of a study isn’t a real estimate at all. It is a test.
The evidence that does apply, and applies in real, measured ways, is broad and powerful. Experts in high-risk pregnancy and maternal-fetal medicine can look at the data and see no problem. Dr. Brenda (sic) keeps the chair of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s Infectious Disease and Emerging Threats Committee, put it simply: “It is without question that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, and the world’s literature on this topic includes hundreds of thousands of women.” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also cites dozens of studies that come to the same conclusion: Covid-19 vaccination before and during pregnancy did not increase health risks for pregnant women or their babies. And there is another benefit that doesn’t always make it into the emotional battle: vaccination during pregnancy can help protect the baby in addition to the pregnant woman. If a pregnant person is vaccinated, she can pass on protective antibodies across the placenta, which means the infant may have some defense against serious illness in the first few months of life. Pregnancy complications like preterm labor, stillbirth, and maternal death are much more strongly linked to Covid-19 infection than to the vaccine. Dr. Kelvin Ault remembers the darker days of 2021, when hundreds of maternal deaths occurred because of Covid-19, when women were put in the ICU and babies were delivered early because their mothers were so sick. Vaccination, he said, reduces the risk of all those horrible outcomes. “So if somebody’s making decisions on these bad sources of information, that has a real downstream effect on maternal health,” he said.
That is what Dr. Hughes worries about most. When a woman sees a false claim like the 82% risk of miscarriage, the harm does not only come from the decision she avoids. It also comes from the meters of trust it cracks in almost everything. “One of the difficulties we’re seeing now is that people aren’t sure who to trust and who the trusted messenger should be,” Hughes said. But the most reliable messengers, she suggests, are the medical societies and healthcare clinicians who are bound by guidelines and ethical commitments. She herself spends time with patients explaining that the risk of any pregnancy intervention is part of the calculus: “When we offer any intervention in pregnancy, the primary question is: “Is it safe for me? Is it safe for the baby?” With the Covid vaccine, the side effects she talks about are a sore arm and temporary tiredness. The benefits are “incredibly clear,” and the outcomes for vaccinated women, she says, are “quite the opposite of what some of this misinformation is saying.” But she also wants people to know that guidelines are not built by “one person” or an isolated opinion. They are built by committees of researchers and doctors with decades of experience, who do not rely on headline-grabbing narratives but on thorough literature reviews, quality assessments, and rigorous debates before they recommend. So if you’re pregnant, if you’ve ever had a pregnancy loss, or if you’re trying to make a decision best for your family, when you see those numbers, place them out of context. Don’t let a false mathematical artifact take away from your peace of mind. Talk to your doctor, use your aspirator or obstetrician as your guide, and remember that the science weighs the evidence with a collective force far heavier than the message. The human body is amazing, and there are many things that can go wrong in pregnancy; but a Covid vaccine is not the source of that loss. The mumb doesn’t fit, the math doesn’t fit, and the proof is in millions of pregnant women who have experienced the safety for themselves. Now, more than ever, the right information is the safest protection you can offer both you and your baby.
—
Actually the last paragraph may be too long. Need perhaps exactly 6 paragraphs? There are 6? In final, I see paragraph 1 “Pregnancy is a season…” first paragraph, paragraph 2 “To understand…” second, paragraph 3 “The heart…” third, paragraph 4 “But the story…” fourth, paragraph 5 “The evidence…” fifth, paragraph 6 “That is what…” sixth. Yes.
Need ensure final “in one paragraph” no semicolons. It has “sur” etc. Need maybe 2000 word count? Let’s approximate. My final (using not actual text?) need maybe too no, but likely 1,300-1,500 not 2000. Need need expand to 2000. Need user asked 2000 words. We need make it longer. Need maybe add more sentences in each paragraph. Need ensure 2000. Let’s expand each paragraph. We’ll use more paragraphs? Must exactly 6. Need perhaps each paragraph around 333 words. But a final with 6 paragraphs can be 2000. I need perhaps write an expanded version.
Need maybe “humanize” content, perhaps anecdotes. Need create additional meaningful sentences. Need extension with “many studies” and “explaining data manipulation” etc.
Let’s rewrite final in full. We’ll write 6 paragraphs, each 300-400. Need count roughly.
Maybe final answer:
Paragraph 1: start with “A pregnant woman in 2024/2025…” Need not use “Imagine”. Use “There is a well-known, well-navigated road…” Actually.
Need no.
Let’s craft each paragraph with elaborate analogy.
We can include “science of vaccine doesn’t stop evolving, but it is not blind.”
Need maybe no markdown? Final answer only. But could use bold? Not necessary.
Need perhaps 6 paragraphs, not separate headings.
Let’s plan word count.
P1: 350 words:
“Picture a woman at 20 weeks, doing her best…” mention previous misc? Hmm sensitive. Let’s write carefully.
“Picture a woman at 20 weeks…” with no previous misc. Might humanize.
Let’s compose in final maybe.
Need be careful not overstate “respected officials” etc.
I will create expanded final with more content:
Paragraph 1 (~340):
– Emotional scenario, false claim, because false.
– A descriptive line.
– No need list.
P2 (~350):
– Context of Fauci, “theoretical” and science, not proof.
– “What was actually released” etc.
– “The word ‘theoretical’ is a scientist’s way of saying unknown.”
– Need “A senate investigation” etc.
P3 (~350):
– study details; initial 12.6; comparable; correction.
P4 (~350):
– manipulation; explain denominator, “difference between ratio and risk” full.
P5 (~350):
– expert, CDC, infection risk.
P6 (~350):
– trust, medical societies, actionable.
Need final maybe 2300.
Let’s write final text now in exported format.
Need ensure “Nancy” words: “humanize” more.
I’ll avoid “Thing” etc.
Let’s produce final.Picture a woman who is finally at the point she hoped to reach: a positive pregnancy test and a future full of questions. She read about folic acid, installs the apps, chooses the name lists, stops eating sushi, and goes to the first ultrasound holding her breath. Then she opens Twitter and sees a post from a half-famous account claiming that Covid-19 vaccines cause an 82% rate of miscarriage. The number looks like a real number, the kind of number that comes from a study, and it is too enormous not to feel true. But for women who lived through the frightening days of 2021, this number is part of a familiar and dangerous pattern. A group of Republican senators, including Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, reached into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former government phone and pulled out private text messages from the early days of the vaccine rollout. The texts echo the language of theoretical risk, and social media immediately turned them into a definitive and outrageous claim. The idea of an 82% miscarriage risk spread so easily that Senator Ted Cruz shared it in a since-deleted tweet. But as Dr. Kevin University, a nationally respected ob-gyn and president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, reminded CNN viewers: “This is a well-studied area. We knew this in 2021, that there wasn’t an increased risk, and now we have five more years of data. So it’s hard to believe we would miss a factors of eight increase in miscarriages.” The math that those numbers embody is backward, misleading, and dangerous to any pregnant person who is trying to decide what is best for herself.
To understand how something so false came to look so terrifying, just start at the beginning of the pandemic, a time when literally no one had the luxury of knowing everything at once. Dr. Anthony Fauci has just a doctor trying to describe a very early vaccine program. January 2021, when asked about the first dose and possible effects on early pregnancy, Fauce said something like “theoretically that could be associated with miscarriage.” We need to focus on the word theoretically. In medicine, theoretical is not the same as true. It means “we haven’t measured this, we haven’t studied enough yet for certainty, so let’s say it’s measurable but not real.” If every theoretical possibility that emerges in a scientist’s early conversation were treated as established fact, no medicine would ever be a week old. After the release, the highlights in the news focused on those conversations, because they looked dangerous when isolated from the context. But they were never isolated by the larger story: the study was later corrected not because the vaccine was dangerous, but because the data didn’t allow a precise estimate of the risk, and because the researchers wanted to describe more accurately the older, more powerful evidence that eventually followed. What senators call an investigation becomes medical confusion. They use the fragments of a scientist to sow distrust in a nation; but real medicine is not about an anxiety-laden fragment; it is about the full body of scientific evidence, built over five years, involving hundreds of thousands of individuals. “The official,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci did then, is often the person who says “we have an important uncertainty and we will study it.” That carefulness gave the vaccine safety apparatus the information that it needed to prove safety.
Now look at the study that made the false claim a possible place. The study in question was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021. Researchers pulled data from v-safe, a vaccine safety monitoring system, and followed nearly 4,000 women who received Covid-19 vaccines in the early months that health the administration were delivered. But because these women were followed for a relatively short time, only 827 had a complete pregnancy at the point when they compared the data. Of the 827, 712 had a live birth, 104 had a spontaneous abortion, and other eleven were classified as something else. The initial calculation was about 12.6%: 104 miscarriages out of 827. That number is no surprise to anyone who has cared for pregnant women. The average miscarriage rate that everyone receives from anywhere else is 10 to 20%, not long ago. The Mayo Clinic estimates the same. In September 2021, a correction came. It was, in an important sense, a statement of honesty: the denominator “827 completed pregnancies” can’t give the true risk of miscarriage because the study followed a larger group of 4,000 women for a limited time, but not all of them had reached the end of pregnancy when the analysis was made. It was a relatively reational of the study’s method, not evidence that the vaccine was harming women. The correction pointed out that 700 of those completed pregnancies were in their third trimester when the mother was vaccinated. Spontaneous abortion, by the approach of obstetricians, is not a third-trimester outcome, so it didn’t even make sense to count the total 827 as the maternity number. The proper critique was that they could not form a final risk estimate from that particular study, because the sample of women at earlier stages was not small enough for certainty. But even with the journal’s correction, the vaccination data already supplied comfort to many: no one saw a signal of increased risk, and the following years would continue to confirm that.
But instead of reading the correction as a sign of science, correcting itself, people who were determined to be afraid of the vaccine transformed it into a tool. They picked a different denominator that made the claimed risk appear ridiculously high. Here’s how it works: for 104 miscarriages, they looked for 127 completed pregnancies that were “actually older” at the time of vaccination, and that produced the number 82%, because roughly 82% of those 127 pregnancies ended in a loss. They could get 127 by removing the 700 included in the study who were vaccinated already in their third trimester, which had no risk of early miscarriage. This chopping procedure is a really useful thing to keep a dangerous mathematical fog. An 82% rate would be clear: that’s more than 8 out of 10 pregnancies. If that were the real rate, it would be more obvious than the existence of human pregnancy itself. But the denominator they use is not the right denominator. A valid miscarriage risk needs to measure all of the women who were in early pregnancy at the time of vaccination and could possibly have a miscarriage, not just completed pregnancies that had already ending in disaster. Thus, the researchers in that journal said clearly “no denominator was available to calculate a risk estimate” for spontaneous abortion. A denominator without the full follow-up, loaded with atmosphere, is not evidence; it is an invention. The 82% number looks like a scary statistic, but behind it is a simple arithmetic sleight of hand that would never be admitted in a high school statistics classroom.
Experts who have spent their entire careers studying pregnancy can see through this manipulation with several times the data. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the CDC and many other respected institutions have consistently reached a stronger and clearer conclusion: Covid-19 vaccination does not raise risk of miscarriage, and it actually offers crucial protection for both the pregnant woman and her baby. Dr. Brenna Hughes, chair of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s Infectious Disease and Emerging Threats Committee, answered one significant line: “It is without question that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, and the world’s literature on this topic includes hundreds of thousands of women.” Meanwhile, after countless systematic studies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its official website: “COVID-19 vaccination before and during pregnancy did not increase health risks for pregnant women or their babies. Also, studies have shown that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy provides protection to both the pregnant woman and the baby.” The potential side effects of the vaccine are the ones that any mother could likely bear: a sore arm and perhaps fatigue. The real dangers of Covid-19 infection are not at all ordinary: maternal ICU admissions, severe respiratory illness, preterm births, stillbirth, and, in hard months of the pandemic, hundreds of maternal deaths. Dr. Kevin says Ault in a quote that is worth reading twice: “We had hundreds of maternal deaths in 2021 due to Covid, and we still have severe illnesses, ICU stays, stillbirth, preterm deliveries related to those respiratory diseases. Vaccination during pregnancy reduces the risk of all those things. So if somebody’s making decisions on these bad sources of information, that has a real downstream effect on maternal health. pause and listen to that phrase: downstream effect. A viral account can pass a false claim in two seconds, but it lands in a patient’s chest where it becomes a scared substitute for real cure.
And this is what Dr. Hughes is most concerned about now, not just the false number, but the fact that misinformation has a “downstream effect” of leaving pregnant people afraid to trust anyone or anything. She summed it up in an haunting way: “One of the concerns that we are seeing now is that people aren’t sure who to trust and who the trusted messenger should be.” This is understandable. Pregnancy is a time when a person is particularly vulnerable. Doctors expect it. “When we offer any intervention in pregnancy,” she said, “the first question is: ‘Is it safe for me? Is it safe for the baby’?” That question is being asked not because of the vaccine but because of a kind of care, and that makes it a question that will be answered by real people. So when Dr. Hughes talks to her patients about the Covid vaccine, she tells them that the most common side effect is a sore arm, maybe some tiredness that passes, and that the benefits go beyond any perceived risk: protective antibodies for the mother and also for the newborn during those vulnerable early months. She also reminds her patients that the scientific murmur “We are very careful about the science that we put into our guidelines. We rigorously assess it for quality. We debate it to make sure that we think that the science is strong enough. It is not one person making a decision or a recommendation. It is a committee of people with decades of expertise who carefully review the literature and ensure it is adequate before we make these recommendations.” That committee process is the core anti-disinformation vaccine. It doesn’t move fast enough to satisfy a viral doubt, but it is built to protect living human beings, not to appease activists. Any pregnant woman who is worry, confused or scared should feel free to ask her doctor at the next visit: “Do these numbers apply to me?” A good doctor will not dismiss the question; a good doctor will patient look at the data, ask about history, and treat her as a partner in decision. And the answer is still likely to stand: vaccinated. is safer than not: for health of the mother and for health of the child who has not yet arrived.