Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain have been rebuked for pushing a false claim that the Covid-19 vaccine given to women in the early stages of pregnancy resulted in an 82 percent miscarriage rate.
Cruz made the claim in a post on X Wednesday promoting the latest episode of his podcast while McClain cited it in an interview with Fox Business Tuesday, causing the network to issue a correction.
The long-debunked figure comes from a misreading of an April 2021 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which reported a 12.6 percent miscarriage rate among the 827 pregnant women who took part in the research – an outcome in line with expectations.
As the gynaecologist and columnist Dr Jen Gunther has explained, the 82 percent figure was only reached by excluding 700 of the 712 women involved who gave birth successfully, on the grounds that they were vaccinated in their third trimester, to give a miscarriage rate of 104/127 instead of 104/827 – warping the end result.
Cruz’s post promising “bombshell data” and claiming that Dr Anthony Fauci and Pfizer had covered up the truth has since been hit with a community note on X explaining that the figure is based on a “statistical miscalculation.”
The senator has also been widely criticized. New York Times journalist David French called his post: “Deeply, dangerously dishonest. He knows better. Yet here we are.”
Former GOP congressman Joe Walsh seethed: “Shame on you Ted Cruz.... You are purposely spreading malicious and dangerous disinformation. How the f*** do you live with yourself?”
Political scientist and Atlantic contributing editor Norman Ornstein fumed: “What an utter dishonest and dangerous disgrace is Ted Cruz.”
Ornstein also posted a takedown of the spurious figure from Dr Jake Scott, an infectious diseases expert from the Stanford Department of Medicine, who wrote, witheringly: “A cover-up conducted by publication in the world’s most-read medical journal is a genuinely novel approach.”
As for McClain, she pushed the same falsehood on Fox Business’s The Evening Edit in an attack on Fauci, telling the show’s stand-in host Jason Chaffetz she considers the veteran public health official a “criminal” and “disgusting.”
The following evening, the show’s regular host Elizabeth MacDonald returned and said: “We want to clarify a segment that aired yesterday with Congresswoman Lisa McClain, where the congresswoman referenced data on miscarriages from an April 2021 study from The New England Journal of Medicine.
“Now, the Journal later corrected how the miscarriage data was calculated and stated, ‘These percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.’”
Republican fury over the pandemic has been revived by Fauci’s recent appearance before the Senate, where he pleaded his Fifth Amendment right to avoid answering questions more than 100 times, causing frustrated GOP lawmakers to vote to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The subsequent publication of text messages between Fauci and his colleagues Dr Rochelle Walensky and Dr Vivek Murthy dating from January 2021 in which the trio discuss the possibility of a link between the vaccine and miscarriages – but, crucially, conclude that “no issues have arisen” – has also stirred up conservatives.
Pundit Meghan McCain reacted with particular indignation over the texts, saying that she herself had suffered a miscarriage during the pandemic and demanding that Fauci be sent to prison.
“This is not hyperbole – handcuff, perp walk and put Fauci in a jail cell for the rest of his life,” she said.
