Sen. Ron Johnson went on Fox News this week with a number that should make every parent in America sit up and pay attention. Not because the number is true. Because a sitting United States senator looked into a camera and said it like it was.
“An 82% miscarriage rate with women who got the injection in the first or second trimester,” Johnson said, straight-faced, in a video posted Aug. 10 on Fox News Digital. Eighty-two percent. He delivered it like a weather report.
Here’s what actually happened. Back in April 2021, the New England Journal of Medicine published a preliminary study of 3,958 pregnant women who’d gotten the COVID vaccine. Of the 827 pregnancies that had wrapped up by the study’s cutoff, 104 ended in miscarriage. That’s 12.6%. The normal range for miscarriage is 10% to 20%. The number was boringly, reassuringly average.
But Johnson and a few others decided to perform surgery on the math. They tossed out 700 women who’d been vaccinated in their third trimester (women who, by definition, couldn’t miscarry in the first trimester because they were already past it). That left 127. Divide 104 miscarriages by 127 and you get roughly 82%.
Here’s the problem, and you don’t need a medical degree to see it. Those 127 women weren’t the only ones vaccinated early. They were just the only ones whose pregnancies had already ended by the time researchers checked back. The other 3,000-plus women vaccinated in early pregnancy were still carrying. Their babies hadn’t been born yet. Johnson counted the losses and ignored the ongoing pregnancies. That’s not science. That’s not even arithmetic. That’s picking the denominator that gives you the scariest possible number.
Johnson’s spokesperson, Grace Carnathan, was asked for evidence. She pointed back to text messages from Dr. Anthony Fauci that Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul released the same day. In those January 2021 texts, Fauci told Vivek Murthy and Rochelle Walensky that some reported vaccine effects “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
That’s the smoking gun? A doctor saying “theoretically” before any data existed? Fauci was speculating in private texts weeks into a brand-new vaccine program. Then the studies came in. Over a million pregnancies tracked worldwide. A 2023 analysis of 21 studies covering more than 123,000 pregnancies. A March 2026 study tracking nearly 12,100 women. Every single one found the same thing: no increased miscarriage risk.
Katie Pavlich piled on too, calling the vaccine “effectively an abortion shot” on X and comparing it to RU-486. Because apparently we’re just saying things now.
I have questions. If Ron Johnson genuinely believes 82% of vaccinated pregnant women lost their babies, why isn’t he holding emergency hearings every single day? Why isn’t he on the Senate floor in tears? If this were real, it would be the worst medical disaster in human history. Instead he went on Fox News, said his piece, and moved on to the next segment.
You know what I think? I think Ron Johnson doesn’t believe it either. I think he found a number that sounds horrifying, didn’t bother to check whether it was real, and ran with it because it makes Fauci look bad. And if some pregnant woman in Wisconsin hears “82% miscarriage rate” and panics, well, that’s just the cost of doing business.
We’re supposed to be the side that trusts what we can see with our own eyes. I can see the math. And the math says Ron Johnson is either too lazy to read a study or too cynical to care.