FDA's Woodcock Warned Fauci in 2021 About Vaccine Side Effects. No Study Was Ever Done.

Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky released another email Sunday from Dr. Anthony Fauci's government account, this one showing a senior FDA official pressing him to study COVID vaccine side effects nearly five years ago. Nobody appears to have done it.

The email is dated May 27, 2021. Dr. Janet Woodcock, then acting FDA Commissioner, wrote to Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins describing reports she had received, including from healthcare professionals, of unexplained symptoms after vaccination.

"The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing," Woodcock wrote, according to the email published by Just The News, the Daily Signal and the Daily Caller. "Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out. But the peoples' main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this."

Woodcock told Fauci and Collins she doubted vaccine manufacturers would fund such research. "I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons," she wrote. "But my experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared."

Woodcock flagged gaps in the safety-tracking systems themselves

Woodcock, a 37-year FDA veteran with a reputation among critics for being close to the pharmaceutical industry, wasn't just relaying complaints. She specifically warned that the government's existing tools for spotting vaccine problems might not be up to the job.

"These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active followup such as CDC has, or a medical record based system such as BEST," she wrote, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and an FDA surveillance program.

Fauci forwarded the email to Collins the next day, writing that Woodcock "asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what" then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky thinks, according to Just The News. Johnson and Paul say it's unclear based on records reviewed so far whether Walensky was ever looped in.

Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, oversaw roughly $5.5 billion in annual research funding, according to the Daily Caller and Daily Signal. Whether the kind of independent side-effect study Woodcock proposed was ever funded or conducted has not been established by any of these releases.

Johnson and Paul's release also notes that by the time Woodcock sent her email, VAERS had logged 440,025 adverse event reports worldwide tied to COVID vaccination, including 8,650 deaths, with 39% of those deaths reported within two days of injection, according to Just The News. VAERS is a passive reporting system that accepts unverified reports from anyone, and a report in the database does not establish that the vaccine caused the event. That distinction matters, and it's one right-leaning outlets covering this release did not emphasize.

The pregnancy texts are a separate thread in the same document dump

This email surfaced alongside a different batch of material: roughly 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails pulled from Fauci's government phone, of which Johnson and Paul have so far released 11, according to CNN. Those include a January 2021 exchange where Fauci told Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Walensky that cytokine storms and fever after a second vaccine dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester."

CNN's reporting adds context the right-leaning coverage largely skipped: the CDC formally recommended vaccination for pregnant people on August 11, 2021, after reviewing data and finding no increased miscarriage risk, and the agency's current guidance states vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risks. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, a Trump appointee, told NewsNation the texts were "shocking" and called Fauci "very irresponsible" for recommending an untested product to pregnant women without flagging the theoretical risk publicly. Bhattacharya is a current political appointee criticizing a predecessor, not a neutral outside reviewer.

Where this fits in the broader investigation

These releases are part of a larger Senate probe. Paul has already referred Fauci for a possible contempt charge after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during a hearing, a move Democratic Sen. Gary Peters called a "witch hunt," according to the Daily Mail. Paul argues Fauci's 2025 pardon from President Biden strips his Fifth Amendment protection on pardoned conduct, a legal theory the Justice Department has not yet ruled on publicly.

No charges have been filed against Woodcock, Fauci or Collins over the side-effect email itself. No investigation into whether the study was suppressed has been announced. What's documented is narrower: a senior regulator raised a specific, technical concern in writing, Fauci acknowledged it internally, and no public record has surfaced showing what, if anything, came of it. Johnson and Paul's committees say they're continuing to review the remaining tens of thousands of pages and messages from Fauci's government devices.