Fauci's defense -- it all depends on what the definition of "red flags" is.
Pregnant women were excluded from the original Pfizer and Moderna Phase 3 clinical trials, meaning that when the vaccines moved into general use under Emergency Use Authorization, their administration to pregnant women was, in practical terms, experimental for that population specifically — no completed trial data existed to establish a safety profile before rollout began. This made VAERS, the passive adverse-event surveillance system, a critical rather than merely supplementary data-collection function: it was the primary mechanism by which any pregnancy-specific safety signal not caught in trials would first surface. Fauci's Jan. 25, 2021 text to Walensky and Murthy — that cytokine storm and fever after the second dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester" — was, in precise terms, a theoretical mechanism, not an observed data signal. His subsequent public statements, on Feb. 3 and Feb. 10, that there were "no red flags," used "red flags" in the narrower sense common to FDA/surveillance parlance: an observed statistical signal in monitored data, as distinct from an unconfirmed hypothesis about a possible pathway to harm. Read that narrowly, the two statements are technically reconcilable — he could truthfully say no data signal had appeared while still holding a private theoretical concern that hadn't yet produced one. But this technical distinction is almost certainly lost on the general public. The overwhelming majority of pregnant women hearing "no red flags" from the nation's top infectious disease official would not have parsed it as "no confirmed statistical signal has yet emerged in surveillance data" — they would have reasonably heard it as "there is no known reason for concern," a materially broader and more reassuring claim than the narrow one Fauci could technically defend. That gap between the technical precision available to him and the plain meaning received by his audience is the crux of the obfuscation debate: whether his phrasing was calibrated to be truthful in a way that predictably misled the people it was meant to inform.
For a general audience, like the February 10th Whitehouse briefing — Merriam-Webster's everyday-usage entry —
"red flag" as a noun is defined roughly as:
"something that indicates or draws attention to a problem, danger, or fault" — a warning sign.
In ordinary, non-technical speech, that's the entirety of the meaning: a red flag is
any indicator, of any kind, that something might be wrong. It carries no built-in requirement about:
- the type of evidence behind it (a hunch, an anecdote, a documented pattern — all count)
- the source of the concern (personal observation, expert opinion, or formal data)
- a statistical threshold being crossed
- whether it's confirmed or merely suspected
An HS-graduate-level lay listener hearing "no red flags" would reasonably parse it as:
"nothing has come up that gives anyone reason for concern" — a broad, all-encompassing reassurance covering both data and reasoning, known and suspected issues alike.