BREAKING: Fauci’s Own Vaccine Chief Warned Him. The Public Got “No Red Flags.”

Today, Ron Johnson released a new text showing Fauci received a clear warning about the mRNA jabs and pregnancy risk from his own expert advisor.

By Sayer Ji [sayerji.substack.com]

Story at a Glance

• On Wednesday I published seven searches the Senate should run on Dr. Fauci’s phone. Search 3 asked one question: who did Fauci “ask around” on the evening of January 25, 2021, before raising a theoretical miscarriage risk with the incoming Surgeon General and the CDC Director? On Sunday morning, the committee released the answer.
• It was Dr. John Mascola — Director of NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center, the government laboratory that co-developed the Moderna vaccine. At 5:47 PM he texted Fauci: “I am corrected on pregnancy studies. Initial Studies avoid vaccination in first trimester due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester.” Fauci read it at 6:42. At 6:45 — three minutes later — it reached the group as “theoretically could be associated.”
• The same day, the committee released a May 2021 email from Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock to Fauci and Collins: the vaccine-injured are real, “no one takes them seriously… there is no effort to study this,” the surveillance systems cannot detect this class of harm, and industry won’t fund the study “for obvious reasons.” It is the missing half of the enforcement-arm story I published Thursday — and I’ll show you why.
• Chairman Johnson, on Fox this weekend: “Everybody’s focusing on the exact percentage of miscarriages. It’s beside the point. The point is these folks saw red flags… they weren’t warning people.” Whoever moved him there, that is the informed-consent frame — and it is now the investigating chairman’s public position.
• The ledger stands at one search answered, six open — and today I’m adding two new searches the documents themselves generated: five timestamped messages from the night of September 23, 2021, and a six-month volume of Dr. Fauci’s diary that the released diary says exists and no one can find.

The Three Words

In five years of podiums, health alerts, and Surgeon General’s advisories, there is a sentence no American health official ever said in public. Not once, not about the pregnancy data, not about the booster data, not about anything.

I am corrected.

Today, we learned that the sentence was said — privately, by text, at 5:47 PM on January 25, 2021, from Dr. John Mascola, one of the most important vaccine scientists in the United States government, to the most famous one. This piece is about that text, the email released alongside it, what both do to the story I published Thursday, and what the committee owes the record next.

MORE NEWS: Today, @SenRandPaul and I released additional context to Dr. Fauci’s message to Drs. Vivek Murthy and Rochelle Walensky expressing concerns about mRNA COVID shots “theoretically” resulting in “miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

On January 25, 2021, Dr. John Mascola,… pic.twitter.com/HWoRQUVaKs

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 16, 2026

A method note first. On Thursday I published two companion pieces: a deep dive into the January texts, and an open letter to Chairmen Johnson and Paul specifying seven searches their staff should run on the phone HHS produced. Search 3 read, in full: “The evening of January 25, 2021, 5:00–7:30 PM Eastern — every message sent or received. Dr. Fauci wrote ‘I asked around a bit more’ before raising the miscarriage mechanism at 6:45 PM. Someone answered him. The public deserves to know who, and what they said.” Three days later, the committee released a message from that evening — from the man who answered him, saying what he said. I won’t pretend to know whether my letter had anything to do with it. Johnson’s staff could have found that window on their own, and probably would have. What anyone can check is the dates: the question went up Thursday, the answer came out today. However it happened, the ledger now reads one answered and six open — and before this piece is over, I’m adding two more.

Who Answered Him

Dr. John Mascola was not a random colleague. He directed the Vaccine Research Center — the NIAID laboratory that co-developed the Moderna vaccine itself. When Fauci “asked around” about vaccine risk in pregnancy, the answer came from inside the product’s own development program.

Now watch the evening unfold by its read receipts, every timestamp from the released documents.

At 4:31 PM, Murthy — then the Surgeon General nominee — asks the group for the data on vaccine risk in pregnancy. At 4:48, Walensky answers that “this is all a data free” zone. At 4:56, Fauci reassures them: there is “no data or theoretical reason” to prefer one timing over another.

At 5:47 PM, Mascola texts Fauci: “I am corrected on pregnancy studies. Initial Studies avoid vaccination in first trimester due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester.”

At 6:42 PM, Fauci reads it.

At 6:45 PM — three minutes later — Fauci writes the group: “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

Put the two texts side by side. Mascola: the studies avoid first-trimester vaccination, due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage. Fauci to the group three minutes later: theoretically could be associated. Even inside the private channel, between the scientist and the policymakers, the language softened in transit — design-level avoidance became a theoretical possibility. And nine days after that, the public got “no red flags.”

Two cautions before anyone runs further with this than the document allows.

First: “Initial Studies avoid vaccination in first trimester” is a fragment with more than one reading. The strongest is that the trial protocols themselves were designed around the risk — the dedicated pregnancy trial that began that February 16th, 2021 enrolled women later in gestation — which would mean the fever-miscarriage concern wasn’t idle speculation but an engineering constraint built into the studies. But Chairman Johnson himself says the text “raises more questions than it answers” and has asked Dr. Mascola to explain it. So should we all. I present the readings; I don’t pick one.

Second, and permanently: none of this alters what the completed epidemiology later found. The properly designed September 2021 analyses — the ones that finally met the standard of complete follow-up and gestational-age-specific comparison — found no excess miscarriage risk. The finding here is not that the vaccine caused losses. The finding is that the reassurance of 4:56 PM was wrong by the government’s own top vaccine scientist’s account within the hour, that the correction traveled privately, softened — and that the public never heard any version of it at all.

Which brings us to the three words that generate the next search targets. “I am corrected.” Corrected by whom? That sentence is the middle of a conversation, not the beginning of one. There is a prior exchange — Fauci’s outbound question, Mascola’s first answer (presumably the source of the 4:56 reassurance), and then whoever corrected the corrector. The committee released one message from that thread. The rest of it — and the identity of the person who knew enough to correct the Vaccine Research Center’s director — is now the most precisely specified outstanding item on the ledger.

The Missing Half

The second document released today completes something I published Thursday, so let me put the two halves together properly.

In “Damaging to Public Confidence,” I laid out the enforcement arm: the campaign, run through the Surgeon General’s office, that a federal appeals court found “likely coerced” the platforms; the subpoenaed Meta email describing a demand to remove true information about side effects unless packaged with reassurance; the Virality Project advising platforms that “true stories of vaccine side effects” could be treated as actionable misinformation; Facebook telling the Surgeon General’s office it was demoting posts that were “not false information.” My conclusion was that the apparatus was suppressing unauthorized possession of what officials believed.

Today, the committee released what else officials believed.

May 27, 2021, 8:51 AM. Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, to Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, subject line “Vaccine adverse events.” In her words: she has been personally contacted by people experiencing adverse events after vaccination, “from all three of the current vaccines”; “many are healthcare professionals, some of whom I know”; the symptoms don’t form a distinctive syndrome and resist standard testing; and then the sentence that should be carved somewhere — “the peoples’ main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.“ She goes further: these problems “are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active follow-up such as CDC has, or a medical record-based system such as BEST.” A study should be done, she writes, but money would be needed, and “I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons.” And she closes with a warning that reads, five years later, like a memo from the future: “if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared.”

Now run the calendar. May 27, 2021 sits squarely inside the months when — per the subpoenaed record I published this week — the Virality Project was instructing platforms that true stories of vaccine side effects were actionable, and Facebook was demoting non-false side-effect posts at the government’s urging. Hold the two records against each other and one sentence carries the whole thing:

The state’s chief drug regulator privately validated the precise testimony the state’s information apparatus was erasing.

Read her line again — “no one takes them seriously” — and understand it completely now. No one took them seriously because taking them seriously was, on the platforms, a removable offense. One machine was structurally unable to detect the harm; she said so herself, in writing, about her own systems. The other machine was deleting the reports of it. Between those two machines, “no one takes them seriously” was not a failure of the system. It was the system.

Precision, as always, because it’s the only thing that keeps this record usable: Woodcock’s systems-blind admission is specific to this class of harm — heterogeneous, hard-to-classify events that don’t form a syndrome. The surveillance systems did detect signals that fit their design; myocarditis is the proof. Her point is narrower and, for the people living it, worse: the injuries that didn’t fit the template didn’t exist to the instruments — and the people reporting them didn’t exist to the platforms. Her email ends with a question to the two most powerful scientists in the American government: “What do you think of this? jw.”

So: what did they think of it? The replies from Collins and Fauci — and the answer to whether the cohort study she proposed was ever funded — are the natural companion release, and I am formally adding them to the ledger. If the replies exist, they matter. If the study was never funded after the FDA’s own chief flagged that the injured were unstudied and the instruments were blind, that matters more. [Note: Chairman Johnson has connected this email to NIH clinical work on post-vaccination cases in early 2021; I am pulling the primary record on that program before characterizing it, and will report what it shows — favorable or not.]

The Chairman’s Pivot

Monsters. https://t.co/YZcakzfXy0

— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) August 17, 2026

One more thing happened this weekend that deserves marking, because almost no one noticed it.

Chairman Johnson went on Fox and said this: “Everybody’s focusing on the exact percentage of miscarriages. It’s beside the point. The point is these folks saw red flags… and they lied bold-faced to the American public that they weren’t seeing them. They weren’t warning people.”

Set aside everything else in that interview and look at the frame. The exact percentage is beside the point. On Thursday I published several thousand words making precisely that argument — that the contested 82% figure is statistically invalid, that it was doing the officials’ rebuttal work for them, and that the documentary record needs no statistical garnish because the informed-consent violation is complete without it. I don’t know what moved the Chairman to that framing, and I won’t claim credit the record can’t support. I’ll simply note the dates, credit him plainly for saying it, and observe what it means: the investigating committee’s public position is now the informed-consent position. The fight has moved off the broken number and onto the ground where the documents are unanswerable. That is where this story always belonged.

The Other Half of the Weekend

Sayer Ji> The Fifth Amendment protects a man from answering questions. It has never protected a text message on a government phone. That device belonged to HHS, and HHS produced it. Whatever he declines to say, the record has already said.https://t.co/Njcrx8utyr pic.twitter.com/jna3oXAeL9

— Ian Ford (@IannFord) August 17, 2026

The same day the documents came out, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed on Meet the Press that the Justice Department has received the contempt referral for Dr. Fauci and is handling it like any other case.

Remember what that referral is for. Not the vaccine. Not the pregnancy guidance. It is for invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times rather than answer the Subcommittee’s questions about his own conduct — and it followed his attorneys’ letter last week declining even a voluntary transcribed interview, on the grounds that a subpoena would “impermissibly harass or degrade” him.

So the testimony channel is closed, possibly for years, and now sits with prosecutors and courts. Which leaves exactly one channel open, and it is the one this piece is about. Chairman Johnson said as much on Friday: since Dr. Fauci won’t talk, the Subcommittee “will continue to obtain his records and request to speak with key individuals that he worked with.”

The Fifth Amendment protects a man from answering questions. It has never protected a text message on a government phone. That device belonged to HHS, and HHS produced it. Whatever he declines to say, the record has already said.

Two New Targets

The seven searches were built from eleven texts. The documents released since — the diary, the Mascola text, the Woodcock email — have generated two more targets, and I’m adding them to the public ledger today.

Target eight: the night of September 23, 2021, on the phone the committee holds. Dr. Fauci’s own diary — released by Chairman Paul, and already reported by Dr. Celine Gounder, Public, and The HighWire — describes that night nearly minute by minute: “multiple phone calls” among Fauci, Jeff Zients, Leslie Dach, and Vivek Murthy, “all outrage[d]” that the CDC’s advisory committee had voted down a booster recommendation; then, in Fauci’s words, “I texted Rochelle and I begged her to call me,” warning it would be “a fatal mistake” to follow her own committee “since none of us would be able to defend this.” Her call at 11:25 PM. His text at 5:30 the next morning. Her reply “right back.” Their call at 5:40. That afternoon, she overrode her advisory committee — a decision reported at the time as her independent scientific judgment. The diary describes at least five discrete, timestamped communications from that night and morning. They should exist in the August 5 production. Search: the Walensky number, September 23 at noon through September 24 at 8:00 AM. If the messages are there, the committee can publish the pressure campaign in the participants’ own words. If they are not there — on a night the diary swears they existed — then the Chairman’s stated concern about deletion has its first named, dated, testable instance. Either outcome is a finding.

Target nine: produce Part 5. The released diary indexes its own missing volume. At page 917 of the PDF, after blank stamped pages, the record resumes with a header: “Part 6 – Continued from Part 5.“ Part 5 appears nowhere in the release. The diary breaks off in late November 2021 — mid-thought, awaiting a “determination in the next two to three weeks regarding the degree of immune evasion” — and resumes on May 31, 2022. The independent archive that has indexed every released page verbatim shows the same hole: not a single diary entry in January, February, or April of 2022. Six months, gone — and not just any six months. That window contains the Omicron reckoning, the Surgeon General’s formal March 2022 demand that platforms turn over their misinformation data, and his strongest public assurances on vaccination in pregnancy. Three possibilities, each answerable with one question: the committee holds Part 5 and hasn’t released it; HHS’s production omitted it; or it was never preserved. Given the Chairman’s public statement that HHS personnel obstructed access to these very records, this may be the cleanest test case he has. The record goes dark at the exact moment the story changed. Someone should have to say why.

The Ledger

Seven searches published Thursday. One answered today — from inside the vaccine’s own development program. Six still open, two new targets added tonight, and two threads owed: whoever corrected Mascola, and whatever Collins and Fauci wrote back to Janet Woodcock.

I said Thursday that this ledger runs on one rule: whatever comes back gets reported, favorable or not. Today tested it immediately. The Mascola text confirms the fever concern was taken seriously inside the program — and the completed studies still found no excess miscarriage risk. Both facts are in this piece, because both are true.

Five years of podiums, and no official ever said those three words in public. You’ve now watched what happened the one time they were said in private: three minutes, one softening, then silence. They couldn’t say it. So the documents are saying it for them — one release at a time.

🚨1/ Fauci’s own vaccine chief — whose lab co-developed the Moderna shot itself — warned him privately: the studies AVOIDED first-trimester vaccination. Fever risk. Miscarriage risk.

Fauci read it at 6:42 PM on Jan 25, 2021.

By 6:45, it was “theoretically.”
By Feb 3, it was… pic.twitter.com/WMg2Y1qitW

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) August 16, 2026