A statistic about COVID-19 vaccines and first-trimester miscarriage that circulated in 2021 has resurfaced in Washington, prompting fact-checks from multiple organizations and renewed attention to what the underlying research actually found. The figure at issue, an 82 percent miscarriage rate, was produced by recalculating a 2021 study in a way its authors did not intend and the study itself does not support.
The claim returned after Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released documents about federal pandemic communications, and Johnson repeated the figure publicly. PolitiFact and FactCheck.org both traced the number back to the same miscalculation.
