Two Republican senators on Sunday released text messages they said showed senior federal health officials raising coronavirus vaccine safety questions that were never shared with the public, even as the government promoted and often mandated the shots.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) released the texts in a thread from Johnson's ๐• account.

The main one is a May 27, 2021 email from Dr. Janet Woodcock (then the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration) to Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government's top infectious-disease official.

The May 27, 2021, email from then-acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock to NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.Released by the offices of Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul.

Woodcock wrote that she had been contacted personally by people reporting adverse events after vaccination, many of them health care professionals, and that "no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this."

Existing surveillance systems, she wrote, were not designed to detect such diffuse symptoms, and she proposed funding a formal study. "What do you think of this?" she asked in closing. No response has been made public.

In text messages from Jan. 25, 2021, Dr. John Mascola, then the government's Vaccine Research Center director, told Fauci that initial studies avoided first-trimester vaccination "due to possible fever and higher rates of miscarriage in first trimester." Three minutes after it was marked read, Fauci wrote that fever after a second dose "theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester." Johnson identified the recipients as Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general nominee, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the incoming CDC director.

Text messages between NIAID's John Mascola and Anthony Fauci, January 25, 2021.Released by the offices of Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul.

The documents reflect officials weighing early, unresolved questions, routine in safety monitoring of new products, and do not establish that the concerns were borne out. Fauci framed the risk as theoretical, tied to fever rather than the shots themselves, and later studies, including the CDC's v-safe pregnancy registry, found no increased miscarriage risk among mRNA vaccine recipients.

Johnson and Paul are seeking testimony from Fauci, Collins, Walensky, Murthy and Mascola in a broader inquiry into the government's pandemic response.