As this week got underway, a variety of Republican officials continued to focus their election-season messaging on, of all things, Covid-19 vaccines. For example, Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, who serves as chair of the House GOP Conference, told Fox Business that 82% of the women “who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage.”
The congresswoman, as part of the same interview, condemned Dr. Anthony Fauci for “straight-up lying to the American people,” which was, among other things, ironic given that she was peddling demonstrably false claims to a national television audience.
Unfortunately, McClain was not alone. A day later, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has a deeply unfortunate track record when it comes to using social media to promote misinformation, posted five online items in less than four hours, each of which claimed that the Covid vaccine had an 82% miscarriage rate.
The senator later took down the relevant tweets, one of which equated Covid vaccines with “chemical abortion drugs,” though an untold number of his millions of online followers saw, and perhaps even believed, his initial claims.
Those claims, however, were dangerously wrong. The New York Times published a fact-check report the day after the Texas Republican’s deceptive tweets, explaining in detail that Covid vaccines are not linked to miscarriage. It specifically referred to the 82% statistic as “misinformation.” From the article:
The people who have spread this statistic calculated it from a table in a preliminary C.D.C. analysis published in April 2021. (The authors of the analysis did not make the misleading calculation.) The calculation only included women who were vaccinated in the first or second trimester and whose pregnancies had been reported as “completed” by April. But because the vaccines were so new, most patients who had received them during the first or second trimester — more than 2,500 women — were still pregnant and not yet accounted for in the analysis.
By the time the paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 104 women had miscarried, and 10 had had abortions or ectopic pregnancies. The 82 percent statistic was calculated by dividing 104 by 127, the number of pregnancies that had ended among women vaccinated during the first or second trimester. This ignored the vast majority of women, who were still pregnant in April 2021 and went on to have healthy babies.
The Times added that once researchers followed up on the outcomes of more women, “the miscarriage rate was comparable to pre-pandemic rates.”
This is similarly reflected on the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which currently states, “Studies examining COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy have included more than a million pregnant women around the world. In these studies, COVID-19 vaccination before and during pregnancy did not increase health risks for pregnant women or their babies. In addition, studies have also shown that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy provides protection to both the pregnant woman and the baby. The benefits of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine outweigh potential risks of vaccination during pregnancy.”
The same CDC website added, “More than a million pregnant women around the world have received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, before and during pregnancy. Studies have shown no increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery, stillbirth, or birth defects.”
Assorted partisans and anti-science advocates will likely keep pushing the false claim anyway, but the public needs to know better. Those wondering about the best course should trust the science, not Cruz and McClain.
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