Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield says federal health officials made an “error in judgment” by broadly recommending COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women—and an even larger mistake by failing to level with the public about the uncertainties surrounding that decision.
Redfield, who led the CDC during President Donald Trump’s first term, delivered the blunt assessment during an interview with NewsNation host Katie Pavlich.
“I never thought we should vaccinate pregnant women,” Redfield said. “I was not in favor of that policy recommendation because the COVID vaccine did not prevent infection.”
He rejected the argument that vaccinating an expectant mother would reliably keep her from becoming infected and thereby protect her unborn child.
“Some people had [the argument] that you had to vaccinate pregnant women to protect the unborn baby because it would protect mommy from getting infected,” Redfield said. “That was not a true statement because it doesn’t prevent infection.”
His conclusion was unambiguous:
“I think it was a mistake to vaccinate pregnant women.”
Redfield later called the policy “an error in judgment.”
Redfield maintained that the vaccines’ principal benefit was reducing serious illness and death—not reliably preventing infection or transmission.
“The only thing the vaccine really accomplished, which was important, was it prevented serious illness and death in people that were at high risk for serious illness and death,” he said.
He identified that population as consisting largely of people older than 65.
“Obviously, that doesn’t include the pregnant-women population,” Redfield added.
That part of his argument is certain to face strong medical pushback. Pregnancy itself was identified during the pandemic as a risk factor for severe COVID illness.
In September 2021, the CDC reported that more than 22,000 pregnant women had been hospitalized with COVID and 161 had died. The agency said infected pregnant women faced twice the risk of intensive-care admission and a 70% higher risk of death than symptomatic women of reproductive age who were not pregnant.
The policy dispute therefore was not simply whether the vaccine prevented infection. It was whether reducing a pregnant woman’s risk of severe disease justified vaccination while pregnancy-safety data were still being collected. Redfield now says the balance did not support a sweeping government recommendation.
There is an important timeline distinction. Redfield left the CDC when Trump’s first term ended in January 2021. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, President Joe Biden’s CDC director, issued the agency’s first clear recommendation that pregnant women should receive the vaccine in April 2021.
The agency strengthened that guidance in August after analyzing additional information from its pregnancy registry. That review included nearly 2,500 women vaccinated before 20 weeks and found no increased miscarriage risk.
Redfield therefore was not the CDC director who instituted the broad recommendation he is now criticizing.
When vaccines first became available in December 2020, pregnant women had largely been excluded from the clinical trials. Federal guidance permitted them to choose vaccination after discussing the known and unknown risks with their physicians, but officials did not yet possess the pregnancy-specific evidence that normally would be expected before making a universal recommendation.
That exclusion—and the confidence with which officials sometimes discussed incomplete data—remains at the center of the controversy.
Redfield’s remarks follow the release of January 2021 text messages between Dr. Anthony Fauci, Walensky and then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The messages were recovered from Fauci’s government-issued phone and released by Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. In one exchange, Fauci raised a theoretical concern about the fever and inflammatory response that could follow a second vaccine dose.
“One could make the argument that fever and the pro-inflammatory cytokine response in the 24–48 hours following the second dose could be an issue in the first trimester,” Fauci wrote.
Walensky responded:
“That’s a good point.”
The exchange shows that senior health officials privately debated a biologically plausible concern while pregnancy data remained limited. Fauci told the public days later that officials were seeing “no red flags.” Critics say that statement projected far more certainty than the private conversation reflected.
Supporters respond that discussing potential risks is precisely what scientists should do—and that subsequent research did not establish an elevated miscarriage rate.
The CDC’s current evidence summary says pregnancy vaccination has been studied in more than one million women worldwide without evidence of increased miscarriage, preterm delivery, stillbirth or birth defects.
Redfield said the greatest failure went beyond the final policy itself.
“The real mistake was that we didn’t have an open, transparent discussion of this for the public,” he told Pavlich.
That discussion, he argued, should have allowed expectant mothers to make individual decisions after hearing an honest assessment of the benefits, uncertainties and potential risks.
Public-health authorities repeatedly acted as though acknowledging uncertainty would fuel vaccine hesitancy. They often responded by delivering conclusions with more confidence than the available evidence justified, policing dissent and assuring Americans that “the science” had spoken.
But science is not damaged when officials say, “We do not know yet.” Trust is damaged when the public later discovers that officials were privately debating concerns that received little emphasis in their public messaging.
The later studies may be reassuring. They do not excuse presenting evolving evidence as settled fact.
Pregnant women were not unreasonable for asking questions about a newly developed vaccine. They were not anti-science for wanting long-term data. And they should never have been bullied into a medical decision by politicians, employers or television personalities demanding universal compliance.
Redfield is now saying plainly what federal health officials should have said from the beginning. Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here are the potential benefits and risks. Now discuss them with your doctor and decide for yourself.
WIRE SOURCES
- Former CDC director calls pregnancy-vaccine recommendation an “error in judgment”
- Fauci’s newly released texts discuss theoretical pregnancy risks
- CDC’s August 2021 statement recommending vaccination during pregnancy
- New England Journal of Medicine: Early pregnancy-loss study
- JAMA: Neonatal outcomes following vaccination during pregnancy
- CDC: Current evidence and individual decision-making guidance
