This is The Middle Way, my series that’s an honest attempt to pop the balloon of outrage, avoid algorithmically-preferenced extremism and find a tenuous middle.

Today’s test case: a statistic ricocheting around the internet claims 82% of pregnant women who got a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried … and that the government knew and hid it.

Well … B.S. is fast. But the truth is slow and sometimes boring. Here’s the paperwork.

I really, really, really wanna stop talking about vaccines.

There are so many things I’d rather spend my time thinking and talking about, like, let’s see, the nature of consciousness or regenerative agriculture or new cancer therapies, basically anything.

But misinformation about vaccines continues to be leveraged by certain right-wing politicians and red-pilled influencers in ways that are so profoundly corrosive, not merely to public health, but more broadly, just to sane epistemology, to how we cohere around reality and fact. And I wanna establish something at the outset here, because I’ve always believed this: I support open debate around incendiary issues.

I believe in a broad marketplace of ideas. I think we should scrutinize pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the FDA, and anybody else exercising enormous institutional power over our lives. In fact, I think some of the failures of the COVID era deserve considerably more scrutiny than they’ve received.

But a marketplace of ideas only works when there is some underlying commitment to fact and truth and reality. It cannot function when people take fragments of legitimate information, strip them of the context that gives them meaning, and then reassemble them into narratives specifically designed to make people frightened and furious, because fear and fury generate votes and clicks and followers and influence.

These are the perverse incentives of social media. And this particular story bothers me so much because it preys on women, particularly pregnant women and mothers, at one of the most vulnerable moments imaginable. Okay, the claim that is currently ricocheting around the internet is that 82% of pregnant women who received a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried.

Let me repeat that. 82% of pregnant women who received a COVID vaccine early in pregnancy miscarried, and that government officials knew there was a potential problem but concealed it from the public. Okay, before I tear this claim to absolute shreds, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a woman who has endured a miscarriage.

This is a profound experience in a woman’s life, often filled with dashed hopes and sometimes with a feeling that their body has let them down. And then as part of that despair, an influencer posts some absolute B.S., giving that mother someone to blame. The government, Big Pharma, Anthony Fauci, fill in the blank, when in fact there is no one to blame.

So this false claim has been revived by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, who released private text messages from early 2021 between Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and Vivek Murthy, who is about to become Surgeon General. Those messages are now being paired with this old 82% statistic and amplified across the vaccine-skeptical media ecosystem, including by Joe Rogan, who recently repeated an 80% figure to an audience of millions on his podcast.

Now, the resulting narrative is extraordinarily powerful because it appears to contain everything that a conspiracy needs. Government officials privately worried about miscarriage. Government scientists subsequently published pregnancy data. Critics discovered that the government’s own numbers supposedly revealed an 82% miscarriage rate, and yet the public was told the vaccine was safe.

It is almost a perfect laboratory demonstration of how misinformation propagates through the modern information ecosystem. And the most fascinating part is that virtually every number used to construct the falsehood is real. The lie isn’t necessarily in the individual facts, the lie is in how they were assembled.

Where the number actually comes from

So let’s go back to December 2020. The FDA authorizes the Pfizer vaccine on December 11th, and Moderna follows up about a week later. Pregnant women have been largely excluded from the pivotal randomized vaccine trials that happened earlier in the fall, which was consistent with the longstanding practice of avoiding experimental interventions in pregnant women when potential fetal effects are unknown. But that creates its own problem because once the vaccine becomes available, pregnant women and their doctors have to make decisions without the randomized data everyone would prefer to have.

And COVID made that decision particularly urgent because pregnancy itself increased the risk of severe disease. So the CDC began gathering real-world data almost immediately. Starting December 14th, the agency’s V-safe surveillance system allowed vaccinated people to report health information through their smartphones, and women who reported being pregnant around the time of vaccination could enroll in a more detailed V-safe COVID-19 vaccine pregnancy registry.

Because healthcare workers were among the first Americans eligible for vaccination, this early population was overwhelmingly composed of healthcare personnel. Of the first 3,958 pregnant women enrolled in the detailed registry, 3,719, or approximately 94%, were healthcare workers.

And I wanna emphasize something that seems obvious but gets lost in hindsight. The scientists did not yet know what the data would show. That’s the point of surveillance. You watch because you don’t know.

The private texts

Okay, now we arrive at the private messages that have generated so much outrage.

On January 25th, 2021, Vivek Murthy asks about the timing of vaccination during pregnancy. Is there any evidence that vaccination is preferable earlier or later in pregnancy? This is a private text thread. Now, Fauci initially responds that there isn’t yet any data, and that he doesn’t know of a theoretical reason to think that timing should matter.

Walensky notes that the risk profile is still essentially data-free, although thousands of pregnant women are now already being monitored, as I described. Then later that evening, Fauci sends another message. He has gone and asked around, and he writes, quote, “I asked around a bit more, and another issue came up that you need to be aware of.

Since many people have significant cytokine storms and fever after the second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester.” Walensky responds that that’s definitely a good point, especially after dose two. Murthy calls it a really good point. Now, imagine encountering only those screenshots on social media in 2026.

What’s your conclusion? Fauci knew. They knew the vaccine caused miscarriages. Except that’s not what the messages say. What Fauci is doing is raising a theoretical biological possibility and asking whether it needs to be considered. And candidly, that’s exactly what scientists are supposed to do. And I’m no Fauci bootlicker.

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Like, I’ve been very critical of him publicly. But this is really just science playing out in its best form. You have a novel vaccine being given to a population that wasn’t adequately represented in the randomized trials for good reason. You know the vaccine can produce a fever and a significant transient inflammatory response.

You know early pregnancy is biologically delicate. So you ask whether that inflammatory response could conceivably increase the risk of a miscarriage. That’s a hypothesis. A hypothesis is not a finding. And I also wanna be careful with the phrase cytokine storm because severe COVID itself can produce profound immune dysregulation and excessive inflammatory signaling.

The ordinary immune response to vaccination should not simply be equated with the pathological cytokine storm associated with severe COVID. The terminology in Fauci’s text might have been a little bit loose there, but the broader theoretical question he was raising is perfectly comprehensible. Could the inflammatory response induced by vaccination somehow affect an early pregnancy?

The next day, Fauci follows up on the text thread and gives his actual position. “When pregnancy data are lacking,” he says, “one has to weigh potential risks against benefits,” while noting that COVID itself can be a serious disease during pregnancy. He also points out that more than 10,000 pregnant women had already received the vaccine without any safety signals emerging.

That sequence matters. The private conversation isn’t “we discovered miscarriages, how do we hide them.” It’s a scientist asking a colleague, out loud and on the record, could this be a risk here? What do we know so far, and what are the surveillance data showing? And simultaneously, the CDC was studying precisely that question.

So that’s not a cover-up. That’s the scientific process functioning in real time.

So then the CDC looked, right?

So the CDC investigators were collecting information through v-safe, the dedicated pregnancy registry, and VAERS. Their preliminary paper covered vaccinations administered from December fourteenth, twenty twenty through February twenty-eight, 2021, with pregnancy outcomes assessed through March.

Eventually, 3,958 women were enrolled in the detailed pregnancy registry. But here’s the number that matters. At the time of this preliminary analysis, only 827 pregnancies had reached an outcome. Among those 827 pregnancies, 712 were live births.

There were a hundred and fifteen pregnancy losses, of which a hundred and four were spontaneous abortions, meaning miscarriages occurring before twenty weeks. There was one stillbirth, while the remaining losses included ectopic pregnancies and induced abortions. (Shimabukuro et al., NEJM 2021)

The researchers looked at these preliminary numbers and reported that they did not see an obvious safety signal while explicitly emphasizing the need for additional longitudinal follow-up, particularly among women vaccinated earlier in pregnancy. That qualification is essential because these researchers had run into a problem that had nothing to do whatsoever with the vaccines.

How the number traveled

They had run into the problem of time. Okay, so how did a hundred and four miscarriages become 82%? Well, imagine that you’re eight weeks pregnant and receive your first vaccine on February fifteenth, 2021.

A few weeks later, researchers close their preliminary dataset. What is your pregnancy outcome? Did you miscarry? No. Did you have a live birth? Well, obviously not. You’re still pregnant. Therefore, you cannot appear among the 827 completed pregnancies because your pregnancy isn’t complete.

And I wanna be very precise here because this point has itself been distorted. The CDC did not stop counting successful births. There was no birth yet to count. Most women vaccinated early in pregnancy simply hadn’t had enough time to deliver before the study’s cutoff arrived. The observation period ended before their pregnancies did.

Statisticians refer to this general problem as censoring. So you haven’t necessarily lost the participant, you simply haven’t observed the relevant endpoint yet. This creates an enormous imbalance. A woman vaccinated at thirty-five weeks can deliver at thirty-eight weeks and immediately appear in the dataset as a live birth.

A woman vaccinated at eight weeks who miscarries at ten weeks can also appear almost immediately because her pregnancy has reached an outcome. But a woman vaccinated at eight weeks, whose pregnancy proceeds perfectly normally, cannot produce a live birth for another seven months. She’s still pregnant.

Now, watch what happens with the numbers.

Of the 827 completed pregnancies, approximately 700 involved women who had received their first eligible vaccine dose during the third trimester. As someone notices, reasonably enough, that these women shouldn’t be included when trying to estimate miscarriage following vaccination early in pregnancy because they’re already beyond the gestational period during which the study defines spontaneous abortion.

So they subtract 827 minus 700, which equals 127. Then they divide the 104 miscarriages by 127. 104 divided by 127 equals 81.9%. And voila, the 82% miscarriage rate is born. The arithmetic is actually right. The logic is total nonsense. The problem isn’t removing the women vaccinated late in pregnancy.

The problem is what isn’t in the denominator at all. There were enormous numbers of women vaccinated early in pregnancy whose pregnancies were proceeding normally, but who simply hadn’t reached twenty weeks, much less delivery, when the researchers took their preliminary snapshot.

The researchers subsequently explained that among the 1,224 women vaccinated before conception or during the first trimester, adequate follow-up through twenty weeks was not yet available for 905 of them. 905. Those women are the ghosts inside that 82% statistic. Now, they weren’t dead. They weren’t hidden.

They weren’t miscarriages. They were just still pregnant, and that’s why the denominator of 127 cannot answer the question being asked of it. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine trying to calculate the graduation rate of a freshman college class three months after school starts by counting only students whose college careers have already ended.

Who’s gonna appear disproportionately in your data set? The dropouts. The successful students haven’t had four years yet to graduate. You would be measuring the speed with which negative outcomes can occur, not the eventual probability of the outcome, and that’s essentially what happened here. Now, here’s also where I think intellectual honesty matters.

The original CDC paper had a denominator problem of its own. The authors initially presented those one hundred and four miscarriages as 12.6% of the 827 completed pregnancies. That’s 104 divided by 827.

But that’s not an appropriate estimate of miscarriage either, because the denominator includes hundreds of women vaccinated late in pregnancy who were already beyond the period in which a miscarriage before twenty weeks could occur following vaccination. And the researchers subsequently acknowledged this explicitly.

They corrected the presentation and said that the denominator of 827 was not appropriate for calculating a risk estimate, and that’s what science is supposed to do. But here’s the extraordinary twist. Some critics correctly identified a flaw in the original CDC denominator and then replaced it with an even worse denominator.

Instead of concluding, we don’t yet have sufficient follow-up to calculate this accurately, they concluded the real miscarriage rate is 82%. At that point, neither 12.6% nor 82% was the appropriate answer. The honest answer was, “We don’t know yet. We’re gonna keep following the pregnancies.” And this is where epidemiology becomes sociology.

By July 2021, the 82% interpretation was circulating online. A New Jersey gym owner named Ian Smith posted the arithmetic on Instagram, and it was perfect social media content because anyone could reproduce it on the calculator sitting in their pocket.

827 minus 700 equals 127. 104 divided by 127 equals 81.9%, which rounds to 82%. It had the seductive quality of something that you’ve personally verified. You’re not trusting the CDC anymore, you’re doing the math yourself, except the math isn’t the problem.

The versions of this argument were subsequently amplified by physicians critical of COVID vaccination, including maternal-fetal medicine physician James Thorpe, which gives the claim something very valuable in the information economy: a white coat.

Now the story isn’t that someone on Instagram misinterpreted a preliminary pregnancy data set, it’s that doctors are sounding the alarm. From there, claims migrate through podcasts, social media accounts, political hearings, and influencers until their provenance disappears entirely.

By the time the average person encounters the claim, it doesn’t sound like a contested interpretation of a preliminary twenty-twenty-one surveillance table. It sounds more like a doctor discovered that the CDC’s own data showed an 82% miscarriage rate. And now, five years later, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul release these old private Fauci communications, giving the statistic an entirely new narrative chassis.

Because suddenly we have both ingredients: Fauci privately wondered about the miscarriages, and the CDC supposedly found an 82% miscarriage rate. Put those together, and you get the most powerful phrase in conspiracism, “They knew.” Then the claim reaches someone like Joe Rogan with an audience of millions who repeats an eighty percent miscarriage figure,

And then suddenly a statistical error born from an incomplete preliminary data set in 2021 has been resurrected in 2026 as evidence of a government cover-up. This is how misinformation compounds, and here’s what makes it so difficult to fight. 80% of pregnant women miscarry. That takes about four seconds to say.

Think about what I’ve had to explain to demonstrate why it’s wrong.

I’ve had to explain:

• the emergency use authorization

• the exclusion of pregnant women from randomized trials

• v-safe

• the pregnancy registry

• gestational timing

• completed versus ongoing pregnancies

• 827, 700, 127, 104.

And hopefully you’re still with me... Fortunately, time passed. But there’s a wonderful thing about this particular controversy. We don’t have to keep arguing about what the incomplete snapshot from early 2021 really meant, because the pregnancies continued. The women who were eight weeks pregnant became twelve weeks, twenty weeks, thirty weeks, and eventually almost all of them delivered.

The missing denominator filled in. Researchers could finally perform the analysis properly using statistical methods designed to account for the fact that women entered observation at different stages of pregnancy and were followed for different lengths of time. And what happened? The 82% signal vanished into thin air.

A subsequent analysis of the v-safe Pregnancy Registry estimated cumulative miscarriage risk at approximately fourteen point one percent overall and twelve point eight percent after age standardization. Numbers totally consistent with the expected background range of miscarriage. (Zauche et al., NEJM 2021) Then scientists looked in other datasets.

The Vaccine Safety Datalink examined a hundred and five thousand four hundred and forty-six pregnancies across eight American healthcare systems and found no increased risk of spontaneous abortion associated with COVID vaccination in the preceding twenty-eight days. The adjusted odds was one point o two, essentially indistinguishable from no association. (Vaccine Safety Datalink, Obstetrics & Gynecology)

Researchers in Norway examined miscarriage and vaccination and likewise found no increased risk. (Magnus et al., NEJM 2021) Then came the systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

A 2022 meta-analysis pooling 21 studies and nearly 150,000 women found a pooled miscarriage rate around 9 percent among vaccinated women, again within the normal background range. (Human Reproduction Update, 2022)

The pooled odds ratio for miscarriage, 1.0. Not 1.8 or even 1.5 or even 1.2, 1.0. Another large systematic review involving nearly a hundred and fifty thousand women likewise found no statistically significant increase in miscarriage among vaccinated women.

And this is what science looks like when you let the process finish. A theoretical concern generates a hypothesis, early surveillance produces incomplete evidence, researchers identify limitations, follow-up accumulates, larger data sets become available, independent researchers study the question in different countries, and meta-analyses combine the evidence.

And eventually, the data did converge. The feared miscarriage signal never appeared. Well, what about COVID infection itself? Now, I could make this story more emotionally satisfying by swinging all the way in the opposite direction, and telling you that COVID vaccination doesn’t cause miscarriage, but COVID infection definitely does.

But I’m not gonna do that because the evidence doesn’t justify that level of certainty either. COVID during pregnancy clearly increases the risk of severe maternal illness and has been associated with other adverse pregnancy outcomes. But when you isolate early miscarriage, the evidence is more mixed.

One major systematic review involving more than one hundred and sixty-eight thousand pregnancies with SARS-CoV-2 infection found no statistically significant association between infection and miscarriage. Other analyses have produced somewhat higher estimates, but with confidence intervals that include no effect.

So the intellectually honest conclusion is longer and less exciting. There is substantial evidence that COVID vaccination does not meaningfully increase miscarriage risk. The evidence about COVID infection and early miscarriage specifically is less definitive, even though infection during pregnancy carries other established risks.

This isn’t Team Vaccine versus Team COVID. It’s an attempt to describe what the evidence actually says. Which brings me to what I think is the more important part of the story here. Why, five years later, is 82% still alive? Because human beings don’t experience information as spreadsheets.

We experience it as stories, and this particular story contains almost every ingredient necessary to hijack the human threat detection system. Pregnant women, unborn children, a novel medical technology, a frightening statistic, a doctor’s authority, secret government communications, pharmaceutical companies, powerful institutions, and the suggestion of a cover-up.

Then add five years of accumulated grievance around COVID, lockdowns and masks and mandates and changing recommendations and government miscommunication and overconfidence and genuine vaccine adverse events, pharmaceutical profits, tons of institutional mistakes, and legitimate controversies over censorship, and what you have is a profound erosion of public trust, and that creates an incredibly combustible environment.

So you drop 82% into that fire, and the number doesn’t have to survive much scrutiny. It only has to generate a feeling, a feeling of fear or anger or betrayal. And once you’ve generated that feeling, every subsequent piece of information gets interpreted through it. That’s why the newly released Fauci texts are so powerful.

If you already believe there was a cover-up, Fauci privately wondering about miscarriage looks like a confession.

But if you read the actual sequence, it looks almost exactly what we want scientists to be doing when confronting a new intervention for which important data are missing. Somebody raises a plausible theoretical risk, colleagues take it seriously, experts are consulted, surveillance is examined, and then evidence accumulates to determine whether the hypothesis is actually true.

If scientists’ private conversations weren’t filled with possibilities that ultimately turned out to be wrong, well, then I’d be worried. But that’s the method of science. Now, could this vaccine cause myocarditis?

It turns out there was a signal, particularly among young males. Could adenoviral vaccines cause unusual thrombosis? There was a rare signal there, too. Could COVID vaccination produce a massive increase in miscarriage? Scientists looked, and the signal wasn’t there. The point of science isn’t that every hypothesis is wrong or every hypothesis is right.

The point is that the hypothesis has to answer to evidence. Now, as a rule, I always try to find a middle way. That’s my motto. So let me say this. There is nothing wrong with distrusting pharmaceutical companies.

There’s nothing wrong with scrutinizing the CDC. There is nothing wrong with questioning Anthony Fauci. There is nothing wrong with revisiting twenty twenty and 2021 and asking whether public health officials sometimes spoke with greater certainty than the evidence warranted. I think many of those questions are totally legitimate and overdue.

But skepticism that activates only when evidence contradicts the institution you distrust isn’t skepticism, it’s confirmation bias. If you demand randomized controlled trials from the CDC but accept a gym owner’s arithmetic without examining his denominator, you’re not independently evaluating evidence, you’re just choosing a new authority.

If you refuse to accept epidemiological evidence because pharmaceutical companies have financial incentives, but immediately accept a physician’s interpretation because he confirms your political worldview, well, then you haven’t escaped appeals to authority. You’ve only switched priests.

Okay, that’s all from The Middle Way for today.

My name is Jeff Krasno, and I am here for you.

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The Middle Way is a Buddhist concept rooted in the avoidance of extremes. It is the place where healthy systems thrive. Call it equilibrium, homeostasis or centeredness.

Across biology, physiology, psychology and economics, resilient systems rarely survive at the poles. They continually adjust, rebalance and return toward the center.
The same is true of politics.

Welcome to the Middle Way, where we resist the gravitational pull of polar extremes and explore the more tenuous, complicated and often more truthful terrain in between.

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COVID was a bewildering and divisive time. Health became politicized like never before. Institutions lost trust. And the underlying conditions of American health - or the lack of it - were laid bare.

Whatever one believes about the vaccine, most of us can agree on one thing: America did not fare well.

More than 1.2 million Americans have died with COVID-19 listed as a cause of death. Excess-mortality analyses suggest the true toll is even higher. When adjusted for population size, the United States ranks among the top 20 countries globally for the COVID death rate. How did a wealthy nation with extraordinary medical resources end up in such a sorry state?

Early in the pandemic, one pattern was unmistakable. Severe COVID was strongly correlated with age and with metabolic conditions like obesity and diabetes. A JAMA paper published in April 2020 (barely a month after lockdown) demonstrated that the virus disproportionately harmed older adults and those with preexisting metabolic disease.

Then came the vaccine. When Trump launched Operation Warp Speed in 2020, the initiative received broad bipartisan support. But as the months unfolded, the vaccine - especially the mRNA Pfizer and Moderna varietals - became a political and cultural fault line. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, 91% of Democrats reported receiving a COVID vaccine, compared with only 66% of Republicans.

As the virus mutated, the vaccine (given that it was engineered for the ancestral strain) became less effective at blocking infection and transmission. Side effects such as myocarditis captured public attention. This led to growing vaccine skepticism on the political right.

At the same time, the overwhelming weight of evidence continued to show strong protection against hospitalization and death. The Biden Administration and liberal media dug in their heels in support of the vaccine. Increasingly, this cleavage became more and more profound and intractable – leading to arguably the deepest political schism since civil rights.

Trying to keep up with the shifting ground, I found myself returning to a simple instinctive hypothesis:

• What if the people at the highest metabolic risk were also the least likely to get vaccinated?

• What if these two vulnerabilities - biological and behavioral - overlapped?

• And what if that convergence shaped America’s pandemic outcome?

That question sent me down a long data rabbit hole. I pulled state-level data from the CDC and other official sources to create a four-tab spreadsheet:

1. COVID mortality rate

2. Obesity prevalence

3. Vaccination rate

4. 2020 presidential vote share

5. (I eventually also look at median household income by state)

I used Excel to plot the data on a series of maps. The maps and correlations I created do not represent an epidemiological study. They don’t establish causation, control for confounders, or assess individual-level risk. This project is a descriptive, population-level exploration meant to surface patterns and generate better questions.

Here’s what emerged:

1. Higher vaccination rates are associated with lower COVID death rates. States with greater vaccine uptake tended to see fewer deaths per capita.

2. Lower obesity rates are associated with lower COVID death rates. Leaner states fared better.

3. Higher obesity rates are associated with lower vaccination rates. The most obese states were often the least vaccinated.

These relationships don’t exist in isolation. They sit inside layers of culture, behavior, and policy.

Many of the states with higher obesity rates are more politically conservative, and those same states had lower vaccine uptake. This consilience resulted in devastating results in the Southeast, including Tennessee, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as Oklahoma and Wyoming.

Politics didn’t cause obesity. Politics didn’t cause COVID. But political identity strongly influenced health behavior during the pandemic, especially around vaccination.

During COVID, vaccination became a proxy for trust, a symbol of autonomy vs. authority, and a cultural signal as much as a medical intervention. Those cultural forces shaped vaccine adoption, which then interacted with underlying metabolic risk.

The takeaway isn’t that one factor explains COVID outcomes. It’s that biology, behavior, and belief systems are aligned in ways that make some populations far more vulnerable than others.

COVID didn’t just expose a virus problem. It exposed a metabolic health problem, a trust problem and a cultural coherence problem - all at once.

One of the most frustrating aspects of COVID, for me, was that we squandered a historic opportunity to teach basic virology to the public. Anyone familiar with evolutionary biology understands that a vaccine built for the ancestral strain would become less effective over time because respiratory viruses mutate quickly. Yet this simple, foundational point was rarely communicated.

We also missed a chance to improve the underlying conditions of American health. From the very beginning, we knew that COVID disproportionately harmed people with metabolic dysfunction, but there was no large-scale governmental effort to strengthen metabolic resilience or to promote lifestyle interventions. Instead, some of the most visible incentives—like Krispy Kreme’s free-donut campaign for the newly vaccinated—ran in the opposite direction.

In some ways, SARS-CoV-2 created an imperfect storm for public health: a virus with a relatively high reproduction rate but a relatively low mortality rate. In practical terms, it infected many people while killing a comparatively small percentage of them. That dynamic left many individuals, including myself, feeling less urgency around vaccination. My concern is that this complacency sets the stage for a far more dangerous epidemic.

We now have a population with significant metabolic vulnerability and a growing distrust of medical interventions, distrust that is increasingly tied to political identity. What happens if a virus arrives with a 20 percent mortality rate?

That is the question that should keep us up at night.

Deep Dive Into The Full Data Sample Here

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If this is the first Middle Way essay you’re reading

The Middle Way is a Buddhist concept rooted in the avoidance of extremes. It is the place where healthy systems thrive. Call it equilibrium, homeostasis or centeredness.

Across biology, physiology, psychology and economics, resilient systems rarely survive at the poles. They continually adjust, rebalance and return toward the center.
The same is true of politics.

Welcome to the Middle Way, where we resist the gravitational pull of polar extremes and explore the more tenuous, complicated and often more truthful terrain in between.

If you’re new here, subscribing gets you everything, including this series. If you already get my Tuesday emails, go to your account settings, find The Middle Way, and choose what sections you’d like in your inbox. Takes about ten seconds.

Everything in this series so far is below. If this made you think of someone who’s also trying to find steadier ground, send it to them.

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The Middle Way is a Buddhist concept rooted in the avoidance of extremes. It is the place where healthy systems thrive. Call it equilibrium, homeostasis or centeredness.

Across biology, physiology, psychology and economics, resilient systems rarely survive at the poles. They continually adjust, rebalance and return toward the center.
The same is true of politics.

Welcome to the Middle Way, where we resist the gravitational pull of polar extremes and explore the more tenuous, complicated and often more truthful terrain in between.

In love, include me,

Jeff

One hundred and eleven times.

That’s how many times, last week, an eighty-five-year-old Anthony Fauci sat under subpoena in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and uttered the same sentence: I decline to answer, on the advice of counsel, on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

Taking the 5th is often redolent of confession. It smells like a man cornered by his own guilt, finally run to ground after five years of dodging. Rand Paul certainly wants you to read the headline that way. And the senate just voted to hold Fauci in contempt.

Today’s essay is part of the Middle Way: a series of essays on Substack where I try to avoid the extremes of the outrage machine and find a tenuous middle.

This requires doing something that is a little out of fashion in the year 2026, which is holding two thoughts in my head at the same time.

Thought one: Anthony Fauci was not a hero above reproach, and his diaries, which were pulled off eleven different government servers and handed to Rand Paul, by way of RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services, reveal a man who was, at moments, vain, defensive, and too enchanted with his own fame.

Thought two: the attempt to turn those flaws into the central crime of the pandemic is disproportionate, scientifically sloppy and politically convenient timing for a party that would very much like you to be thinking about anything other than the Epstein files, the price of gas or the war its supposedly anti-war president started in the Middle East.

Both of those things are true. Let’s take them one at a time.

What Actually Happened Last Week

On July 29^th, Fauci appeared under subpoena in front of the Senate committee. He invoked the Fifth more than a hundred times. Paul says the precise count is 111. His attorney’s argument (and it’s not a crazy one) is that Paul has spent months publicly promising to prosecute Fauci, which means anything Fauci says under oath now could be used to build a case against him later, even though President Biden’s pardon covers his federal conduct through January of last year. A pardon can’t protect him from a false statement charge for something he says today. So, pleading the Fifth here isn’t an admission of guilt. It’s what a lawyer tells you to do when the person asking the questions has already announced the verdict he’s working backward from.

I want to be careful not to let that turn into a full defense, though. Fauci ran one of the most powerful public health apparatuses on the planet during the most consequential health event of our lifetimes. The public is owed an accounting. A hearing that looks and feels like a show trial doesn’t erase that debt; it just makes it harder to collect honestly.

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The Diaries

Eleven hundred and forty-one pages, late 2019 through 2022, and by most accounts released without much redaction. What’s actually in them is less a smoking gun and more a character study, and not always a becoming one.

Fauci tracked his television appearances and noted flattering comments. He seemed pleased by his own ascent into a pandemic celebrity, and he wrote, more than once, with the tone of a man managing his brand rather than a man managing a crisis.

On May 21, he wrote that his fame was “explosive,” calling himself the country’s most famous and talked-about person and observing that Trump seemed enamored of him despite him taking the spotlight.

Lets hover there for a moment because I think it matters and I don’t want to wave it away just because I find the people prosecuting it distasteful. We should want our public health leaders to be humble. We should want them undistracted by the warm soapy bath of their own fame. A man charting his press coverage while the country buries six figures a year of its dead is not a crime, but it’s not inconsequential either. It’s a real flaw in a real person who was, by every account, exhausted and a little drunk on a kind of relevance he’d never had before and would never have again.

But vanity is not a conspiracy. So far, what’s in these pages looks a lot more like evidence of an ego than evidence that Fauci created the virus, funded its creation knowingly or ran a cover-up. Reuters has gone through a lot of the passages Paul is calling contradictions, and found that most of them are broadly consistent with what Fauci was saying publicly at the time: not identical, but consistent. And it’s important to remember that ground conditions were shifting on a daily basis in the pandemic’s early days – so timing is important.

The Lab-Origin Question

This is the part I want to get exactly right, because it’s the part where both sides tend to lie to you with confidence.

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 is still unresolved. The FBI leans toward a lab incident. The CIA later said a lab-related origin was more likely, but with low confidence, which is a very different sentence than “the CIA confirmed it came from a lab.” Other American intelligence agencies still lean toward natural spillover. China’s refusal to hand over full records has made this, maybe permanently, a mystery.

Here’s what’s fair to say:

Fauci, and a good chunk of the scientific establishment around him, spoke about the natural-origin theory with more certainty than the evidence supported, while treating the lab-leak question, which was always scientifically plausible, like it belonged exclusively to the tinfoil-hat crowd. That was a real failure, and an instructive one, because it’s the kind of malfunction that happens whenever institutions decide a question is too politically radioactive to be asked out loud by respectable people.

But I want to put a date stamp on that failure, because context changes the shape of it without excusing it. This is 2020. This is the year QAnon goes from a message-board curiosity to mainstream fever dream. This is Pizzagate’s sequel season: a sitting president’s supporters convinced that a Democratic pedophile ring is being run out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor that, incidentally, does not have a basement. This is the run-up to Stop the Steal, to fantasies of military tribunals, of mass executions, of Trump getting quietly reinstated by the Space Force. I could keep going. There’s a whole cinematic universe of 2020 conspiracism and the lab-leak theory did not arrive on a dispassionate stage. It arrived in the same news cycle, sometimes the same sentence, as Bill Gates microchipping the vaccine and 5G towers playing a role in transmission of the virus. If you were a public health official in the spring of 2020, watching a scientifically plausible hypothesis get discussed in the same breath as satanic tunnels under a pizza shop, it’s understandable why your instinct was to lump it in with the rest of the swampland and wave it off.

That’s context, not absolution. Here’s the inconvenient part: every so often, a conspiracy theory turns out to be true. Not often. But often enough that “this sounds like a conspiracy theory” is not, on its own, a rebuttal. And when a fringe idea does turn out to hold water (even partially) or as an unresolved possibility, it does something corrosive to the whole information ecosystem. It hands a small trophy to 4chan and to the swampiest corners of the internet, and lets them say: “see, we told you, the mainstream lies to you, trust us instead.”

That is a real cost. It’s arguably a higher cost than the original error, because it doesn’t just misinform people about one virus; it teaches millions of people that the differential diagnosis for “things institutions dismiss” should default to “probably true.” That’s a dangerous penchant for an undereducated country, and Fauci’s blanket dismissiveness, understandable in its moment, gave it momentum. The result is that it’s become quite fashionable now to “not trust the experts.” Of course, unless you board a plane and you want to land safely. But the damage to institutional trust is real, and the responsibility for that erosion should be shared by all sides.

There’s one more layer of context worth adding here, and I want to be precise about the sequence, because it’s a two-step move and both steps matter.

1. Step one, back in 2020: a real and vocal contingent on the left, journalists, public health voices, some scientists, didn’t just dismiss the lab-leak theory as unproven. Many of them actively labeled it racist or xenophobic, on the theory that entertaining a Chinese-lab origin was really just laundering anti-Asian sentiment through a science question. That framing helped push the hypothesis to the fringe faster and harder than the evidence alone ever would have.

2. Step two, now, in 2026: Republicans have taken that history and repackaged it into a tidy indictment: see, the left called this racist, and it turned out to be plausible all along, so the whole thing was just more woke overreach, more evidence that they’ll smear any inconvenient question as bigotry to protect a narrative.

I don’t think that’s an unfair reading of what occurred on the left in 2020. It was a mistake to conflate a question about a virus’s origin with a question about people’s putative racism. But I want to lay the other half of the context right next to it, because the same spring and summer, the president of the United States is standing at campaign rallies in Tulsa and Phoenix calling the virus “Kung Flu,” and his own press secretary is at the White House podium defending it as merely “linking it to its place of origin.” So, whatever you think about the left’s racism framing, it wasn’t invented from nothing. It was responding, badly and too broadly, to something that was actually happening in real time, at the highest level of government, on camera. Both of those things are true at once: the left overcorrected into calling a legitimate scientific question racist, and the right was, simultaneously, actually being racist about it. Neither fact cancels the other out. That’s just what 2020 was.

And look, hindsight is 20/20. Literally, in this case, since so much of what we’re now re-litigating happened in 2020. It is very easy, five years, sitting in a quiet room with the full transcript in front of you, to draw a clean line from what someone said in March to what turned out to be true in December. It is much harder to remember that the ground itself was moving underneath everyone’s feet on something close to a daily basis: the case-fatality estimates revised, the transmission models revised, the guidance on surfaces, then droplets, then aerosols, revised again. We are building tidy narratives of villainy out of a year that, as it was actually lived, had almost no straight lines in it at all.

Here’s what’s not fair to say:

That Fauci called the lab-leak theory impossible in public while privately believing it was certain. What the diaries seem to show is closer to a man privately entertaining a possibility he publicly minimized, which is squishier and less cinematic than “he lied,” but it’s also just... true. He eventually said publicly that he kept an open mind. His public emphasis, though, leaned hard toward the spillover story, harder than the state of the evidence ever justified.

For what it’s worth, I’ve investigated this one deeply, more deeply than is probably healthy, and I’ll tell you where I personally land, with the appropriate hedge that I am a citizen scientist and not a virologist. There’s a real cluster of circumstantial evidence for a lab origin. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology reportedly fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the official case count begins. The Institute took its entire database of more than twenty thousand virus samples offline in September of 2019, without explanation, months before anyone outside China had heard the word coronavirus. And this was, unambiguously, a lab doing gain-of-function-adjacent research on bat coronaviruses; that much isn’t in dispute. Then there’s the furin cleavage site, a small string of amino acids on the spike protein that makes the virus dramatically better at infecting human cells, and which doesn’t show up in any of its closest known relatives in bats.

None of that is proof.

Furin sites do occur naturally in other coronaviruses, and nature is a much better engineer than we tend to give it credit for. But if you made me put a number on it, and I want to be honest that this is a gut-level synthesis, not a laboratory finding, I’d land somewhere around 65/35 in favor of a lab origin over a natural spillover. I’d also tell you, in the very next breath, that anyone who claims to know this with 100 percent certainty, in either direction, is telling you more about their politics than about the virus. I don’t think we will ever know for certain.

EcoHealth, Gain-of-Function and the $600,000

The nonprofit is EcoHealth Alliance, run by a scientist named Peter Daszak. The headline NIAID grant was roughly three point seven million dollars over five years, for research into bat coronaviruses. Of that, something in the neighborhood of six hundred thousand dollars eventually flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over several years, for sampling and lab work. A broader government accounting found that, across several different sub-awards from different American recipients, the Wuhan lab received something closer to one point four million dollars total between 2014 and 2021. So, the number moves depending on whether you’re counting one grant or every dollar traced from every source. HHS’s inspector general later found that NIH and EcoHealth simply failed to monitor this money properly, and that EcoHealth didn’t get, or didn’t hand over, information NIH had actually asked for from the Wuhan lab. HHS eventually debarred EcoHealth and Daszak entirely.

That’s a real, documented failure of federal oversight. I’m not interested in soft-pedaling it. But notice: the failure isn’t really about the dollar figure. Six hundred thousand dollars is a rounding error against NIH’s budget. The real question was never “how much,” it was “what experiments, under what safety conditions, classified how, reported to whom.” A small grant can still fund a genuinely dangerous experiment. The number is a distraction from the substance, in exactly the same way “111 times” is a distraction from what Fauci actually said and didn’t say.

Which brings us to gain-of-function, a phrase that gets thrown around like it has one meaning, when it actually has at least two.

In the broadest scientific sense, gain-of-function just means you’ve modified an organism so it acquires or strengthens some trait. That’s an enormous category. It covers a huge amount of ordinary virology, getting a virus to grow better in a lab dish, building an animal model of a disease, tracking how a virus might dodge the immune system. Most of that research is uncontroversial and, frankly, essential. It’s how we get vaccines and treatments before a threat fully arrives.

The controversial subset, the part people are actually scared of, is research specifically aimed at making a potential pandemic pathogen more transmissible, more lethal or better at evading immunity.

• The argument for doing that kind of work is real: you learn which mutations to watch for, you build better surveillance, you get ahead of nature.

• The argument against it is also real, and it’s the scarier one: the odds of a lab accident or a security failure are low, but the ceiling on the downside is a global pandemic.

Small probability with a planetary consequence. That asymmetry is the whole debate.

A good chunk of the Fauci-Paul fight is really just two men using two different definitions of the same phrase and shouting past each other. Paul means the broad version. Fauci, testifying under the federal regulatory definition, said the funded work didn’t qualify as gain-of-function research of concern under that narrow policy definition. Both of those statements can be technically true and still leave you with the uneasy sense that Fauci reached for the definition that let him say no rather than the one that best described what actually happened in that lab.

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Masks

I’ve said before, casually, that masks didn’t do much to protect the wearer because the virus could get in through the eyes or because people wore them wrong. That’s true as far as it goes, but it understates the actual evidence, and I want to be more precise here than I have been in the past.

Cloth masks and loose surgical masks are a very different animal from a properly fitted N95. A well-fitted N95 does two separate jobs: it reduces what an infected person breathes out into a room, and it reduces what an uninfected person breathes in. Real-world CDC data found consistently lower infection odds among people who wore masks or respirators, and the effect was strongest, by a wide margin, for N95S and KN95s specifically. This was an aerosol-spreading virus. An N95’s electrostatic weave was built for exactly that kind of particle.

So, the sharper, fairer critique of the mask era isn’t “masks don’t work.” It’s that public health authorities collapsed a bandana, a blue surgical mask, and a properly fitted N95 into one word, “mask,” and then delivered that word as a moral command instead of what it actually was: a dose-reduction tool whose effectiveness depended entirely on filtration, fit, the setting you were in, how long you were in it and how well the room was ventilated. That’s a communication failure, not a scientific one. And communication failures, when you’re asking an entire country to change its behavior for two years, are not small.

Trump

Fauci sat on Trump’s task force. Trump held the actual executive authority the entire time. In February of 2020, Trump told Bob Woodward, on tape, that the virus was airborne and more dangerous than the flu, and then spent the next month telling the country it was nothing, it would disappear, it would be gone by April. He later admitted to Woodward that he’d played it down on purpose.

He pushed hydroxychloroquine hard, with essentially no evidentiary basis. He didn’t literally tell people to drink bleach (let’s be precise, because precision is the whole point of this episode), but he did publicly wonder aloud whether disinfectant could somehow be used inside the body, live, on camera, prompting doctors everywhere to issue emergency warnings that people should not do the thing the president had just mused about.

He wants credit for Operation Warp Speed. At the same time, he’s spent the years since distancing himself from the vaccine it produced, because there’s a political constituency he needs that has gone fully anti-vaccine. And when RFK Jr. rebuilt the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, he put Robert Malone in as vice chair, the same Malone who has claimed, without a shred of supporting evidence, that the COVID vaccine killed seventeen million people. Malone resigned this past March, amid a legal fight over the committee’s legitimacy. But he sat on that panel, shaping American vaccine policy, for the better part of a year.

It’s not just Trump’s failure on COVID. There is some serious “outrage” asymmetry happening on the right. I can’t possibly catalog all of Trump’s peccadilloes here but let’s just enumerate a couple of them:

• Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, in a scheme to conceal a hush-money payment to an adult-film performer who said she’d had a sexual encounter with him shortly after his wife gave birth.

• A civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her afterward, the jury stopped short of the word “rape” only because of a narrow technicality in New York’s penal code, and the judge who oversaw the case wrote, in his own ruling, that what the jury found Trump did was rape “as commonly understood,” whatever the statute’s fine print required. That verdict has now survived appeal all the way up through the Supreme Court, declining to hear it.

• Trump’s own financial disclosures show he personally made more than two billion dollars in 2025 off cryptocurrency ventures carrying his name, a meme coin launched three days before he took office and a token-sale operation called World Liberty Financial run in part by his sons, while sitting in the Oval Office with the actual regulatory authority over how that industry gets policed. Nearly a million people who bought into his meme coin lost a combined 3.8 billion dollars. He kept 636 million of it personally, on that coin alone. A sitting president used the platform of the presidency to launch a financial product, collect the winnings, and let the retail buyers absorb the loss. If you’re looking for self-dealing, that’s not a rounding error. That’s the whole business model.

• Epstein.

I’m not enumerating these to say “well, your guy is worse than my guy, so nobody’s guy is guilty.” I’m cataloging it because the arithmetic of outrage in this country has become completely detached from the size of the offense. Fauci may have been vain. He may have leaned on a narrow legal definition to dodge an uncomfortable truth. He may have spoken with more certainty about viral origins than the evidence ever supported. Those are real, legitimate, documentable failures, and I’m not here to launder them.

But we are being asked to accept that those failures are the central crime of the pandemic, while a man who privately knew the danger and publicly lied about it, who floated injecting disinfectant, who wants sole credit for the vaccine and no blame for the backlash against it, who installed vaccine skeptics into the very body that approves vaccines for American children, and who is a convicted felon for an entirely unrelated act of hush-money fraud, that man is treated, by the same people demanding Fauci’s head, as basically a bystander in all of this.

That’s not accountability. That’s a magic trick. You compress an entire national catastrophe into one aging bureaucrat, and while everyone’s staring at him, the actual architecture of power gets to walk out of the room clean.

Where I Land

If I have to boil five thousand words down to one sentence: Fauci deserves scrutiny, real scrutiny, not the theater we got this week, for his overconfidence, for the government’s genuinely sloppy oversight of dangerous research, and for a diary that reveals a man a little too in love with his own celebrity. And the Republican effort to turn those specific, real failings into the singular defining crime of COVID is wildly disproportionate, and it happens to arrive at the exact moment this same party would rather not discuss the Epstein files, or inflation or the war in Iran or the denuding of Medicaid.

Is Fauci a sinner or a saint?

I don’t think that’s actually the right question and I think our compulsion to keep asking it that way is a symptom of something bigger than this one hearing. We’ve lost our tolerance for holding two truths about the same person at once.

Fauci was not a saint.

He was also not the author of the plague.

He was a man with real faults: vanity, overconfidence, a taste for the spotlight that got the better of his judgment more than once, who also spent a long career, decades before any of us had heard of Wuhan, doing work that saved a meaningful number of lives. And he was hardly the only official who got things wrong during COVID.

The lab-origin question, the muddled mask guidance, the sloppy grant oversight, those were institutional failures, distributed across agencies and administrations and both political parties, not the private sins of one aging immunologist.

What we need isn’t a tribunal. We need to sit down, honestly, without the cameras rolling and the fundraising emails going out, and study what worked and what didn’t, so that next time a pandemic rears its head, we’re a little better prepared. We don’t need a witch hunt. We need an honest postmortem.

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🎧 You can also listen to the companion episode on The Commune Podcast. Each week, I connect with teachers, spiritual leaders, scientists, doctors, and storytellers on topics such as food, health, philosophy, personal growth, environmental regeneration, and social wellbeing. Or listen on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.

If this is the first Middle Way essay you’re reading

The Middle Way is a Buddhist concept rooted in the avoidance of extremes. It is the place where healthy systems thrive. Call it equilibrium, homeostasis or centeredness.

Across biology, physiology, psychology and economics, resilient systems rarely survive at the poles. They continually adjust, rebalance and return toward the center.
The same is true of politics.

Welcome to the Middle Way, where we resist the gravitational pull of polar extremes and explore the more tenuous, complicated and often more truthful terrain in between.

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Somewhere between the two sides is where you actually live, and nobody’s built a home for that.

My political instincts are an outgrowth of my spiritual leanings: I am a fledgling Buddhist. A core philosophy of Buddhism is Madhyamaka, translated as “the middle way.” For the Buddha, this meant walking the path between hedonism and asceticism. More broadly, it can be understood as the avoidance of extremes.

I’ve spent a good chunk of life exploring the mechanisms of human physiology. If health can be reduced to one word, it’s this: balance. Or, the body’s ability to foster equilibrium. In biology, we call this precarious state homeostasis. The body is remarkably designed to cultivate balance from blood sugar to hormones, from acidity to energy.

Healthy systems cluster toward the middle.

In ecology, the healthiest systems demonstrate a balance between species. We call this biodiversity. In economics, the most thriving countries boast a strong “middle” class with a wealth distribution that looks like a bell curve, not two spikes at the ends. In psychology, we seek centeredness – an ability to bounce back to a state of equipoise.

Politics is not exempt from this equation. The body politic resembles the human body. When pushed to the extremes, it becomes unstable, sometimes diseased. It’s characterized by chaos, and an inability to cooperate, listen, and find common ground.

Our politics resembles a frayed shoelace: bunched at the ends, an ever-thinning thread holding the extremes together. Our information sandbox only exacerbates polarization as it algorithmically preferences extremism and hyperbole. Social media is designed to tickle human negativity bias and keep people in a permanent state of amygdala hijack. It erodes critical thinking and devalues nuance. And the loudest voices in the room are exceptional at pulling its levels.

But the truth is almost always in the grey zone, in the middle.

So, I’m launching the Middle Way here as a means of untangling complex issues with rigor and nuance. I want to give voice to the people who don’t succumb to the perverse incentives of compulsory contrarianism and sensationalism. There are more of us out there than we think. In fact, 45% of Americans now identify as politically independent.

What you’ll get:

• Regular essays and musings that hold two simultaneous thoughts.

• A willingness to be critical of “both sides” when called for.

• Rigorous research.

• Self-correction when appropriate.

Subscribe free and it comes to your inbox every week. Go paid for the longer essays and the parts of this I’m still working out in real time.

There’s a strong middle in this country somewhere. I think we find it together, one week at a time.

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If this is the first Middle Way essay you’re reading

This one lives in a section of my Substack called The Middle Way. It’s not the newsletter you’re used to getting from me. It’s a weekly case for the political middle, built on the same instincts I write about everywhere else, biology, philosophy, the body’s habit of correcting itself when it drifts too far in one direction. Politics isn’t exempt from that.

If you’re new here, subscribing gets you everything, including this. If you already get my Tuesday emails, go to your account settings, find The Middle Way, and choose what sections you’d like in your inbox. Takes about ten seconds.

Everything in this series so far is below. If this made you think of someone who’s also trying to find steadier ground, send it to them.

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