If there were any hopes left for a prompt deal to end the Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, they’re on life support now. Donald Trump and Iran spent Monday making a series of escalatory tit-for-tat demands about war reparations, oil futures jumped about five percent on the day, and this morning U.S. forces fired on and disabled a Panama-flagged ship that had attempted to run America’s blockade of Iranian ports. Happy Tuesday.
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Shots, Shots, Shots
by Andrew Egger
God knows we’ve had plenty of recent contenders, but yesterday may have been the greatest policy day in history for America’s antivax cranks. There were two triumphs.
First, Donald Trump signed, with great fanfare, a long-awaited executive order to upend America’s pediatric-vaccine schedule. American kids, the president insisted, are simply taking far too many shots. It’s too much liquid going into the kids, in his view. All that liquid, you’re bound to run into trouble.
“I’ve seen proof of where they have a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda and pour it into a little child’s body,” the president said, describing a real vaccine process that definitely, actually, totally happens.
In the best-case scenario, this change will lead to nothing but still more vaccine hesitancy from people who take the president and his antivax-kook advisers at their medical word. At worst, it will lead to unnecessary policy changes that force parents to make many more trips to the pediatrician to get the same amount of vaccine coverage. Either way: lower vaccine uptake, fewer immunized kids, more sickness.
Even this remarkable policy shift, however, wasn’t yesterday’s talk of the antivax town. Trump’s action was quickly overshadowed by revelations from Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul purporting to show the greatest vaccine villainy yet from certified COVID villain Anthony Fauci.
Johnson and Paul breathlessly accused Fauci of knowing that pregnant women who got the COVID vaccine exposed themselves to enormous miscarriage risk—and of squelching this information to cheerlead publicly for the vaccines. The senators pointed to a text message Fauci sent to a pair of CDC bigwigs in January 2021: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
This stood in sinister contrast, the senators alleged, with an answer Fauci gave during a public Q&A a few days later: Initial FDA surveillance data had “found thus far—and we’ve got to be careful—but thus far, no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”
And it got worse. Fauci, in the senators’ telling, would go on to cover up data showing that pregnant women who received an mRNA COVID shot would miscarry at rates of over 80 percent. “It was effectively an ABORTION SHOT,” a MAGA influencer tweeted in a post shared by Sen. Paul. “This is MURDER.”
These allegations went off like a bomb on social media, with MAGA influencers and politicians outdoing themselves to denounce Fauci in tweets that racked up millions upon millions of views. Fauci was a villain, a monster, a demon. Fauci belonged in jail for life. “For Fauci and other Marxists,” Sen. Mike Lee mused, “was the likelihood of widespread fetal demise a feature or a bug?”
But it was all pure weapons-grade horseshit—every bit of it, layer on miserable layer.
The one real thing was the text. Fauci, in January 2021, did in fact muse to some colleagues that vaccine-induced fever could theoretically create a pathway to miscarriage. As the vaccine data rolled in, this would be something for data surveillance to watch out for.
Even at this moment, however, signs were encouraging. This was what Fauci would go on to say a few days later in that livestreamed Q&A: As far as the FDA could tell, they were witnessing no spike in miscarriages among the first pregnant women to receive the vaccine.
At that early date, it’s important to emphasize, scientists knew very little about possible COVID-shot side effects for pregnant women. This was for a simple reason: Pregnant women had been excluded, as is extremely common, from the earliest safety tests. While some had received the shots in later, bigger tests, the data for pregnant women still necessarily lagged a few months behind. As a result of this gap, public-health officials proceeded cautiously. Even as mass vaccine rollouts began to the public in early 2021, the CDC remained agnostic on whether pregnant women ought to take them: Not until April did the body endorse the shot for women in their third trimester, and not until August did they back shots for women at earlier stages of pregnancy. They did this because of a growing body of evidence from across the country and the world: The surveillance data was rolling in, and happily, Fauci’s caveat had proven ungrounded. No link existed between the COVID shots and miscarriage risk.
The information laid out by the senators, then, actually shows the opposite of what they claim. It shows Fauci and his coworkers working with exactly the care and concern their detractors accuse them of lacking. They moved slowly and cautiously, examining all possible theoretical risks, including risks to pregnant women. They updated their guidance slowly and cautiously, too, only enthusiastically backing the shot for pregnant women once they had hard data to suggest it was safe to do so.
For his pains, Fauci is now smeared as a baby killer and one of history’s greatest monsters, and threatened with prison or worse.
Incredibly, some of the allegations against America’s onetime top epidemiologist are stupider still. That 80 percent miscarriage rate claim is a hallucinated number that results from a misreading of one early pregnancy-risk study. We now have a cornucopia of data to assure us that—as Trump’s own CDC states clearly on its website—“COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risks for pregnant women or babies.” More than that, it’s simply preposterous on its face. Millions of American women got the shots while in the early days of a pregnancy. These senators, and their boosters in the woolly world of MAGA infotainment, apparently expect us to believe that these millions of women took the inadvertent equivalent of an abortion pill—without ever registering a bump in miscarriage rates or a dip in births.
Here’s another interesting thing: That 80 percent number isn’t new. This particular bit of innumeracy had already been floating around the internet for five years before Sens. Paul and Johnson saw fit yesterday to introduce it to new audiences. In their press release on the matter, the senators sourced it to an open letter written in 2022 by an obvious crank MD whose concerns about the shot goes far beyond its supposed risks to pregnant women: “There must be an immediate moratorium on the use of all COVID-19 vaccines,” the doctor writes. “This product is NOT safe for human use.”
This sort of pure conspiracy-brain gibberish has been big on the right for years. Once upon a time, however, one could console oneself that it was just the domain of the lunatic fringe. After all, the COVID shots were in no small part the work of the Trump administration, and Trump was still eager to take credit.
If that ship hadn’t sailed before yesterday, it sure has now. For Republicans, spreading the looniest antivax gibberish imaginable is now a whole-of-government initiative.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Rod Dreher Thought JD Vance Would Save Conservatism. Oops. The writer thought his friend would stand up to the antisemitic right. His criticism of the vice president is too little, too late, writes MATT JOHNSON.
Trump Is Running Out of Missiles—and Options—In Iran… On Bulwark Takes,