St. Fauci Took The Fifth. His Text Messages Did Not.

For six years we were instructed that questioning the COVID vaccine rollout made you a crank, a conspiracist, or a threat to public health. The approved position was that the science was settled, the messaging was honest, and anyone asking about risks in pregnancy was spreading misinformation. Turns out the man delivering that message had questions of his own. He just kept them on his phone.

Senator Ron Johnson has begun releasing texts pulled from Anthony Fauci's government iPhone, obtained from HHS as part of the investigation he and Senator Rand Paul have been running. The first batch includes a January 2021 exchange between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and Vivek Murthy, who would shortly become Surgeon General. In it, Fauci relays something he had been told and thinks his colleagues should know. Because of the immune response many people experienced after the second dose, he wrote, this "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."

January 2021. Privately. To the two other most powerful public health officials in the country.

Now recall the public posture during that same period. Pregnant women were told the vaccine was recommended and safe. Many were mandated into it to keep their jobs. The same cultural establishment that will not let an expectant mother finish a glass of wine at dinner had no patience whatsoever for a woman who wanted to wait a trimester and ask questions. She was the problem. She was the science denier.

Johnson's point, and it is the right one, is that this is an informed consent story before it is anything else. Informed consent means the patient gets the same information the officials have, including the uncertainties, including the theoretical concerns, including the things nobody has ruled out yet. It does not mean the experts privately trade caveats while publicly projecting total confidence, then call you unhinged for sensing the gap.

There is a defense available here, and it is worth stating so nobody is surprised by it. Fauci was flagging a hypothesis to colleagues, which is arguably exactly what a scientist should do, and he used the word theoretically. Fine. Then say so at the podium. Tell the country there is an open question and here is how we are going to answer it. That is what an honest public servant does with an uncertainty. What happened instead was a messaging operation that treated doubt itself as the disease.

As for accountability, Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in July and invoked his Fifth Amendment right rather than answer questions. The Senate held him in contempt. The referral now sits at the Justice Department. A remarkable posture for a man who once suggested that criticism of him amounted to criticism of science itself. Science, it seems, has retained counsel.

Johnson says this is the beginning and more is coming. Conservatives should watch it closely, and they should insist the standard applies going forward regardless of who occupies the podium. Nobody in this country should learn what their government was worried about six years after being told there was nothing to worry about.