GOP Congresswoman claims 82% of women vaccinated in the first two trimesters miscarried. But the math doesn’t add up

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) claimed on Fox Business that 82% of women who got a COVID-19 vaccine in their first or second trimester of pregnancy suffered a miscarriage. She cited a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine to back her claim.

The statement came during an appearance on The Evening Edit, where Jason Chaffetz filled in for host Elizabeth MacDonald. Mediaite points out that McClain’s comments followed the release of new text messages between Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and Dr. Vivek Murthy from January 2021, which have brought renewed attention to early conversations about the vaccine and pregnancy.

The 82% figure McClain cited does not match what the study actually found. The research reported a miscarriage rate of 12.6% among people with completed pregnancies, a number in line with typical miscarriage rates.

McClain calls officials’ handling of vaccine risk information criminal

McClain said the newly released texts show health officials privately discussing risks they did not share publicly. 

Speaking on Fox Business, she said: “It’s disgusting, and it’s criminal, in my opinion. As a mother, I can’t imagine being pregnant, listening to the man in charge straight up lie to the American people. You try so hard to get pregnant, and then you listen to him – oh! In fact, I think he actually said that there was never a risk to pregnancy. Never a risk. When in fact, The New England Journal of Medicine said 82% who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage. I mean, that is criminal, and it’s disgusting, and this man should be held accountable for it.”

The January 2021 texts show Fauci, Walensky, and Murthy discussing theoretical concerns about miscarriage at a time when safety data on the vaccine was still limited. In the same messages, Fauci also noted that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already received the vaccine and that “no issues have arisen.” 

Later research, including the NEJM study McClain referenced, found no increased risk of miscarriage tied to COVID-19 vaccination. The CDC went on to recommend vaccination during pregnancy. The study’s limited data has fueled broader debates about pregnancy and government policy, such as when federal judges criticized ICE’s treatment of pregnant women in detention. 

The NEJM study drew on data from the V-Safe registry, a smartphone-based system that tracks COVID-19 vaccine side effects, along with information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

A total of 3,958 people who reported being vaccinated during pregnancy were enrolled in the V-Safe pregnancy registry. Of these, complete pregnancy outcome data was available for 827 people at the time the study was published, since many participants were still pregnant.

Among those 827 people, 712 had a live birth (86.1%), 104 had a miscarriage (12.6%), one had a stillbirth (0.1%), and 10 had an ectopic pregnancy or induced abortion (1.2%). Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and the author of the Substack “The Vajenda,” wrote in a 2021 post that these numbers fall within the typical miscarriage rate range of 10% to 26%.

Gunter explained that the 82% figure comes from a miscalculation. Of the 712 live births in the dataset, he said 700 involved people vaccinated in their third trimester. The 82% claim is reached by removing those 700 third-trimester births from the total while still counting the 104 miscarriages, changing the fraction from 104 out of 827 to 104 out of 127.

According to Gunter, this method does not hold up because the data set only includes pregnancies that had already ended. The debate over vaccination guidance for pregnant individuals is not isolated, as a woman in Alabama faced a serious condition. 

Gunter wrote that a proper calculation of miscarriage rates tied to first- or second-trimester vaccination would require using all pregnancies vaccinated in that window as the denominator, not just the ones with completed outcomes. The study’s authors reported that 1,040 people were vaccinated in the first trimester and 1,700 in the second trimester, but noted that full follow-up data for these pregnancies were not yet available when the paper was published.