The 82% Miscarriage Lie, and How it Got Made

This is The Middle Way, my series that’s an honest attempt to pop the balloon of outrage, avoid algorithmically-preferenced extremism and find a tenuous middle.

Today’s test case: a statistic ricocheting around the internet claims 82% of pregnant women who got a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried … and that the government knew and hid it.

Well … B.S. is fast. But the truth is slow and sometimes boring. Here’s the paperwork.

There are so many things I’d rather spend my time thinking and talking about, like, let’s see, the nature of consciousness or regenerative agriculture or new cancer therapies, basically anything.

But misinformation about vaccines continues to be leveraged by certain right-wing politicians and red-pilled influencers in ways that are so profoundly corrosive, not merely to public health, but more broadly, just to sane epistemology, to how we cohere around reality and fact. And I wanna establish something at the outset here, because I’ve always believed this: I support open debate around incendiary issues.

I believe in a broad marketplace of ideas. I think we should scrutinize pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, and anybody else exercising enormous institutional power over our lives. In fact, I think some of the failures of the COVID era deserve considerably more scrutiny than they’ve received.

But a marketplace of ideas only works when there is some underlying commitment to fact and truth and reality. It cannot function when people take fragments of legitimate information, strip them of the context that gives them meaning, and then reassemble them into narratives specifically designed to make people frightened and furious, because fear and fury generate votes and clicks and followers and influence.

These are the perverse incentives of social media. And this particular story bothers me so much because it preys on women, particularly pregnant women and mothers, at one of the most vulnerable moments imaginable. Okay, the claim that is currently ricocheting around the internet is that 82% of pregnant women who received a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried.

Let me repeat that. 82% of pregnant women who received a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried, and that government officials knew there was a potential problem but concealed it from the public. Okay, before I tear this claim to absolute shreds, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a woman who has endured a miscarriage.

This is a profound experience in a woman’s life, often filled with dashed hopes and sometimes with a feeling that their body has let them down. And then as part of that despair, an influencer posts some absolute B.S., giving that mother someone to blame. The government, Big Pharma, Anthony Fauci, fill in the blank, when in fact there is no one to blame.

So this false claim has been revived by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, who released private text messages from early 2021 between Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and Vivek Murthy, who is about to become Surgeon General. Those messages are now being paired with this old 82% statistic and amplified across the vaccine-skeptical media ecosystem, including by Joe Rogan, who recently repeated an 80% figure to an audience of millions on his podcast.

Now, the resulting narrative is extraordinarily powerful because it appears to contain everything that a conspiracy needs. Government officials privately worried about miscarriage. Government scientists subsequently published pregnancy data. Critics discovered that the government’s own numbers supposedly revealed an 82% miscarriage rate, and yet the public was told the vaccine was safe.

Therefore, they knew, they lied, they covered it up. There’s just one problem: the 82% isn’t real. And now I’m gonna spend the next fifteen minutes once again debunking this absolute B.S. in an endless game of Whac-A-Mole because I think this particular essay is worth understanding in detail.

It is almost a perfect laboratory demonstration of how misinformation propagates through the modern information ecosystem. And the most fascinating part is that virtually every number used to construct the falsehood is real. The lie isn’t necessarily in the individual facts, the lie is in how they were assembled.

So let’s go back to December 2020. The FDA authorizes the Pfizer vaccine on December 11th, and Moderna follows up about a week later. Pregnant women have been largely excluded from the pivotal randomized vaccine trials that happened earlier in the fall, which was consistent with the longstanding practice of avoiding experimental interventions in pregnant women when potential fetal effects are unknown. But that creates its own problem because once the vaccine becomes available, pregnant women and their doctors have to make decisions without the randomized data everyone would prefer to have.

And COVID made that decision particularly urgent because pregnancy itself increased the risk of severe disease. So the CDC began gathering real-world data almost immediately. Starting December 14th, the agency’s V-safe surveillance system allowed vaccinated people to report health information through their smartphones, and women who reported being pregnant around the time of vaccination could enroll in a more detailed V-safe COVID-19 vaccine pregnancy registry.

Because healthcare workers were among the first Americans eligible for vaccination, this early population was overwhelmingly composed of healthcare personnel. Of the first 3,958 pregnant women enrolled in the detailed registry, 3,719, or approximately 94%, were healthcare workers.

And I wanna emphasize something that seems obvious but gets lost in hindsight. The scientists did not yet know what the data would show. That’s the point of surveillance. You watch because you don’t know.

Okay, now we arrive at the private messages that have generated so much outrage.

On January 25th, 2021, Vivek Murthy asks about the timing of vaccination during pregnancy. Is there any evidence that vaccination is preferable earlier or later in pregnancy? This is a private text thread. Now, Fauci initially responds that there isn’t yet any data, and that he doesn’t know of a theoretical reason to think that timing should matter.

Walensky notes that the risk profile is still essentially data-free, although thousands of pregnant women are now already being monitored, as I described. Then later that evening, Fauci sends another message. He has gone and asked around, and he writes, quote, “I asked around a bit more, and another issue came up that you need to be aware of.

Since many people have significant cytokine storms and fever after the second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.” Walensky responds that that’s definitely a good point, especially after dose two. Murthy calls it a really good point. Now, imagine encountering only those screenshots on social media in 2026.

What’s your conclusion? Fauci knew. They knew the vaccine caused miscarriages. Except that’s not what the messages say. What Fauci is doing is raising a theoretical biological possibility and asking whether it needs to be considered. And candidly, that’s exactly what scientists are supposed to do. And I’m no Fauci bootlicker.

Like, I’ve been very critical of him publicly. But this is really just science playing out in its best form. You have a novel vaccine being given to a population that wasn’t adequately represented in the randomized trials for good reason. You know the vaccine can produce a fever and a significant transient inflammatory response.

You know early pregnancy is biologically delicate. So you ask whether that inflammatory response could conceivably increase the risk of a miscarriage. That’s a hypothesis. A hypothesis is not a finding. And I also wanna be careful with the phrase cytokine storm because severe COVID itself can produce profound immune dysregulation and excessive inflammatory signaling.

The ordinary immune response to vaccination should not simply be equated with the pathological cytokine storm associated with severe COVID. The terminology in Fauci’s text might have been a little bit loose there, but the broader theoretical question he was raising is perfectly comprehensible. Could the inflammatory response induced by vaccination somehow affect an early pregnancy?

The next day, Fauci follows up on the text thread and gives his actual position. “When pregnancy data are lacking,” he says, “one has to weigh potential risks against benefits,” while noting that COVID itself can be a serious disease during pregnancy. He also points out that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already received the vaccine without any safety signals emerging.

That sequence matters. The private conversation isn’t “we discovered miscarriages, how do we hide them.” It’s a scientist asking a colleague, out loud and on the record, could this be a risk here? What do we know so far, and what are the surveillance data showing? And simultaneously, the CDC was studying precisely that question.

So that’s not a cover-up. That’s the scientific process functioning in real time.

So the CDC investigators were collecting information through v-safe, the dedicated pregnancy registry, and VAERS. Their preliminary paper covered vaccinations administered from December fourteenth, twenty twenty through February twenty-eight, 2021, with pregnancy outcomes assessed through March.

Eventually, 3,958 women were enrolled in the detailed pregnancy registry. But here’s the number that matters. At the time of this preliminary analysis, only 827 pregnancies had reached an outcome. Among those 827 pregnancies, 712 were live births.

There were a hundred and fifteen pregnancy losses, of which a hundred and four were spontaneous abortions, meaning miscarriages occurring before twenty weeks. There was one stillbirth, while the remaining losses included ectopic pregnancies and induced abortions. (Shimabukuro et al., NEJM 2021)

The researchers looked at these preliminary numbers and reported that they did not see an obvious safety signal while explicitly emphasizing the need for additional longitudinal follow-up, particularly among women vaccinated earlier in pregnancy. That qualification is essential because these researchers had run into a problem that had nothing to do whatsoever with the vaccines.

They had run into the problem of time. Okay, so how did a hundred and four miscarriages become 82%? Well, imagine that you’re eight weeks pregnant and receive your first vaccine on February fifteenth, 2021.

A few weeks later, researchers close their preliminary dataset. What is your pregnancy outcome? Did you miscarry? No. Did you have a live birth? Well, obviously not. You’re still pregnant. Therefore, you cannot appear among the 827 completed pregnancies because your pregnancy isn’t complete.

And I wanna be very precise here because this point has itself been distorted. The CDC did not stop counting successful births. There was no birth yet to count. Most women vaccinated early in pregnancy simply hadn’t had enough time to deliver before the study’s cutoff arrived. The observation period ended before their pregnancies did.

Statisticians refer to this general problem as censoring. So you haven’t necessarily lost the participant, you simply haven’t observed the relevant endpoint yet. This creates an enormous imbalance. A woman vaccinated at thirty-five weeks can deliver at thirty-eight weeks and immediately appear in the dataset as a live birth.

A woman vaccinated at eight weeks who miscarries at ten weeks can also appear almost immediately because her pregnancy has reached an outcome. But a woman vaccinated at eight weeks, whose pregnancy proceeds perfectly normally, cannot produce a live birth for another seven months. She’s still pregnant.

Of the 827 completed pregnancies, approximately 700 involved women who had received their first eligible vaccine dose during the third trimester. As someone notices, reasonably enough, that these women shouldn’t be included when trying to estimate miscarriage following vaccination early in pregnancy because they’re already beyond the gestational period during which the study defines spontaneous abortion.

So they subtract 827 minus 700, which equals 127. Then they divide the 104 miscarriages by 127. 104 divided by 127 equals 81.9%. And voila, the 82% miscarriage rate is born. The arithmetic is actually right. The logic is total nonsense. The problem isn’t removing the women vaccinated late in pregnancy.

The problem is what isn’t in the denominator at all. There were enormous numbers of women vaccinated early in pregnancy whose pregnancies were proceeding normally, but who simply hadn’t reached twenty weeks, much less delivery, when the researchers took their preliminary snapshot.

The researchers subsequently explained that among the 1,224 women vaccinated before conception or during the first trimester, adequate follow-up through twenty weeks was not yet available for 905 of them. 905. Those women are the ghosts inside that 82% statistic. Now, they weren’t dead. They weren’t hidden.

They weren’t miscarriages. They were just still pregnant, and that’s why the denominator of 127 cannot answer the question being asked of it. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine trying to calculate the graduation rate of a freshman college class three months after school starts by counting only students whose college careers have already ended.

Who’s gonna appear disproportionately in your data set? The dropouts. The successful students haven’t had four years yet to graduate. You would be measuring the speed with which negative outcomes can occur, not the eventual probability of the outcome, and that’s essentially what happened here. Now, here’s also where I think intellectual honesty matters.

The original CDC paper had a denominator problem of its own. The authors initially presented those one hundred and four miscarriages as 12.6% of the 827 completed pregnancies. That’s 104 divided by 827.

But that’s not an appropriate estimate of miscarriage either, because the denominator includes hundreds of women vaccinated late in pregnancy who were already beyond the period in which a miscarriage before twenty weeks could occur following vaccination. And the researchers subsequently acknowledged this explicitly.

They corrected the presentation and said that the denominator of 827 was not appropriate for calculating a risk estimate, and that’s what science is supposed to do. But here’s the extraordinary twist. Some critics correctly identified a flaw in the original CDC denominator and then replaced it with an even worse denominator.

Instead of concluding, we don’t yet have sufficient follow-up to calculate this accurately, they concluded the real miscarriage rate is 82%. At that point, neither 12.6% nor 82% was the appropriate answer. The honest answer was, “We don’t know yet. We’re gonna keep following the pregnancies.” And this is where epidemiology becomes sociology.

By July 2021, the 82% interpretation was circulating online. A New Jersey gym owner named Ian Smith posted the arithmetic on Instagram, and it was perfect social media content because anyone could reproduce it on the calculator sitting in their pocket.

827 minus 700 equals 127. 104 divided by 127 equals 81.9%, which rounds to 82%. It had the seductive quality of something that you’ve personally verified. You’re not trusting the CDC anymore, you’re doing the math yourself, except the math isn’t the problem.

The versions of this argument were subsequently amplified by physicians critical of COVID vaccination, including maternal-fetal medicine physician James Thorpe, which gives the claim something very valuable in the information economy: a white coat.

Now the story isn’t that someone on Instagram misinterpreted a preliminary pregnancy data set, it’s that doctors are sounding the alarm. From there, claims migrate through podcasts, social media accounts, political hearings, and influencers until their provenance disappears entirely.

By the time the average person encounters the claim, it doesn’t sound like a contested interpretation of a preliminary twenty-twenty-one surveillance table. It sounds more like a doctor discovered that the CDC’s own data showed an 82% miscarriage rate. And now, five years later, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul release these old private Fauci communications, giving the statistic an entirely new narrative chassis.

Because suddenly we have both ingredients: Fauci privately wondered about the miscarriages, and the CDC supposedly found an 82% miscarriage rate. Put those together, and you get the most powerful phrase in conspiracism, “They knew.” Then the claim reaches someone like Joe Rogan with an audience of millions who repeats an eighty percent miscarriage figure,

And then suddenly a statistical error born from an incomplete preliminary data set in 2021 has been resurrected in 2026 as evidence of a government cover-up. This is how misinformation compounds, and here’s what makes it so difficult to fight. 80% of pregnant women miscarry. That takes about four seconds to say.

Think about what I’ve had to explain to demonstrate why it’s wrong.

I’ve had to explain:

• the emergency use authorization

• the exclusion of pregnant women from randomized trials

• v-safe

• the pregnancy registry

• gestational timing

• completed versus ongoing pregnancies

• 827, 700, 127, 104.

I mean, B.S. is fast. Truth is slow and boring and has paperwork.

And hopefully you’re still with me... Fortunately, time passed. But there’s a wonderful thing about this particular controversy. We don’t have to keep arguing about what the incomplete snapshot from early 2021 really meant, because the pregnancies continued. The women who were eight weeks pregnant became twelve weeks, twenty weeks, thirty weeks, and eventually almost all of them delivered.

The missing denominator filled in. Researchers could finally perform the analysis properly using statistical methods designed to account for the fact that women entered observation at different stages of pregnancy and were followed for different lengths of time. And what happened? The 82% signal vanished into thin air.

A subsequent analysis of the v-safe Pregnancy Registry estimated cumulative miscarriage risk at approximately fourteen point one percent overall and twelve point eight percent after age standardization. Numbers totally consistent with the expected background range of miscarriage. (Zauche et al., NEJM 2021) Then scientists looked in other datasets.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink examined a hundred and five thousand four hundred and forty-six pregnancies across eight American healthcare systems and found no increased risk of spontaneous abortion associated with COVID vaccination in the preceding twenty-eight days. The adjusted odds was one point o two, essentially indistinguishable from no association. (Vaccine Safety Datalink, Obstetrics & Gynecology)

Researchers in Norway examined miscarriage and vaccination and likewise found no increased risk. (Magnus et al., NEJM 2021) Then came the systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

A 2022 meta-analysis pooling 21 studies and nearly 150,000 women found a pooled miscarriage rate around 9 percent among vaccinated women, again within the normal background range. (Human Reproduction Update, 2022)

The pooled odds ratio for miscarriage, 1.0. Not 1.8 or even 1.5 or even 1.2, 1.0. Another large systematic review involving nearly a hundred and fifty thousand women likewise found no statistically significant increase in miscarriage among vaccinated women.

And this is what science looks like when you let the process finish. A theoretical concern generates a hypothesis, early surveillance produces incomplete evidence, researchers identify limitations, follow-up accumulates, larger data sets become available, independent researchers study the question in different countries, and meta-analyses combine the evidence.

And eventually, the data did converge. The feared miscarriage signal never appeared. Well, what about COVID infection itself? Now, I could make this story more emotionally satisfying by swinging all the way in the opposite direction, and telling you that COVID vaccination doesn’t cause miscarriage, but COVID infection definitely does.

But I’m not gonna do that because the evidence doesn’t justify that level of certainty either. COVID during pregnancy clearly increases the risk of severe maternal illness and has been associated with other adverse pregnancy outcomes. But when you isolate early miscarriage, the evidence is more mixed.

One major systematic review involving more than one hundred and sixty-eight thousand pregnancies with SARS-CoV-2 infection found no statistically significant association between infection and miscarriage. Other analyses have produced somewhat higher estimates, but with confidence intervals that include no effect.

So the intellectually honest conclusion is longer and less exciting. There is substantial evidence that COVID vaccination does not meaningfully increase miscarriage risk. The evidence about COVID infection and early miscarriage specifically is less definitive, even though infection during pregnancy carries other established risks.

This isn’t Team Vaccine versus Team COVID. It’s an attempt to describe what the evidence actually says. Which brings me to what I think is the more important part of the story here. Why, five years later, is 82% still alive? Because human beings don’t experience information as spreadsheets.

We experience it as stories, and this particular story contains almost every ingredient necessary to hijack the human threat detection system. Pregnant women, unborn children, a novel medical technology, a frightening statistic, a doctor’s authority, secret government communications, pharmaceutical companies, powerful institutions, and the suggestion of a cover-up.

Then add five years of accumulated grievance around COVID, lockdowns and masks and mandates and changing recommendations and government miscommunication and overconfidence and genuine vaccine adverse events, pharmaceutical profits, tons of institutional mistakes, and legitimate controversies over censorship, and what you have is a profound erosion of public trust, and that creates an incredibly combustible environment.

So you drop 82% into that fire, and the number doesn’t have to survive much scrutiny. It only has to generate a feeling, a feeling of fear or anger or betrayal. And once you’ve generated that feeling, every subsequent piece of information gets interpreted through it. That’s why the newly released Fauci texts are so powerful.

If you already believe there was a cover-up, Fauci privately wondering about miscarriage looks like a confession.

But if you read the actual sequence, it looks almost exactly what we want scientists to be doing when confronting a new intervention for which important data are missing. Somebody raises a plausible theoretical risk, colleagues take it seriously, experts are consulted, surveillance is examined, and then evidence accumulates to determine whether the hypothesis is actually true.

If scientists’ private conversations weren’t filled with possibilities that ultimately turned out to be wrong, well, then I’d be worried. But that’s the method of science. Now, could this vaccine cause myocarditis?

It turns out there was a signal, particularly among young males. Could adenoviral vaccines cause unusual thrombosis? There was a rare signal there, too. Could COVID vaccination produce a massive increase in miscarriage? Scientists looked, and the signal wasn’t there. The point of science isn’t that every hypothesis is wrong or every hypothesis is right.

The point is that the hypothesis has to answer to evidence. Now, as a rule, I always try to find a middle way. That’s my motto. So let me say this. There is nothing wrong with distrusting pharmaceutical companies.

There’s nothing wrong with scrutinizing the CDC. There is nothing wrong with questioning Anthony Fauci. There is nothing wrong with revisiting twenty twenty and 2021 and asking whether public health officials sometimes spoke with greater certainty than the evidence warranted. I think many of those questions are totally legitimate and overdue.

But skepticism that activates only when evidence contradicts the institution you distrust isn’t skepticism, it’s confirmation bias. If you demand randomized controlled trials from the CDC but accept a gym owner’s arithmetic without examining his denominator, you’re not independently evaluating evidence, you’re just choosing a new authority.

If you refuse to accept epidemiological evidence because pharmaceutical companies have financial incentives, but immediately accept a physician’s interpretation because he confirms your political worldview, well, then you haven’t escaped appeals to authority. You’ve only switched priests.

Okay, that’s all from The Middle Way for today.

My name is Jeff Krasno, and I am here for you.

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