Stat Publishes Institutional Projection and Rhetorical Inversion, Calling for Policy to Return to One Based on Little-to-No Evidence

A Rebuttal to Rosenbaum & Hughes: Clinging to a Tradition of Low-To-No-Evidence is not a good look for StatNews. You will want to share this article. The easy days at ACIP are over.

This opinion piece by Rosenbaum and Hughes is a remarkable exercise in rhetorical inversion — a projection of precisely the critique it seeks to level at HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Let’s rebut the illogic step by step, with clarity and without appealing to ideology or authority.

The June 4, 2025 STAT article by Sara Rosenbaum and Richard Hughes IV, titled “HHS Secretary Kennedy Told Us Not to Listen to Him. We Agree”, is a textbook case of institutional projection and rhetorical inversion. The authors claim to defend evidence-based medicine while simultaneously reinforcing vaccine policies that were never based on high-quality evidence in the first place. Their argument is framed as a rebuke of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it fall flat on its face by inadvertently exposes the hollow scaffolding of public health decisions made under emergency conditions—and by calling for return to the zero-evidence lack of inertia that keeps them in place.

Let us be clear: RFK Jr. did not issue a final medical recommendation. He called for a reevaluation of a vaccine policy that was instituted without adequate clinical trial data in the very populations it targets—pregnant women and children. This is not “dangerous.” It’s overdue.

We respond to the main points of their argument below.

1. “Evidence-free pronouncements”? Let’s talk about evidence-free policy.

The authors accuse Kennedy of making “evidence-free” claims by stating that pregnant women and children should not be vaccinated against Covid-19. Yet no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were conducted on pregnant women prior to the emergency use authorization of the vaccines. Pregnant women were explicitly excluded from the original trials (Shimabukuro et al., NEJM, 2021). Follow-up studies were largely observational, uncontrolled, and incapable of detecting low-frequency harms.

As for children, the FDA authorized mRNA vaccines based on immunobridging—a statistical assumption from antibody titers—not demonstrated reductions in disease burden or transmission in children. StatNews did not require the authors to report that the pediatric trials were underpowered to detect adverse events like myocarditis, which later emerged as a statistically significant risk in young males (CDC ACIP, June 2022; Oster et al., JAMA, 2022). They claim that ACIP is empowered by Congress, but the devil is in the detail of the mandate: Congress requires ACIP to use data, not assumption.

It is not Kennedy but his critics who are defending a recommendation still lacking the rigorous evidence base normally expected in medicine. Kennedy is, in fact, correcting course after years of institutional inertia and uncritical expansion of recommendations.

2. “Don’t listen to me for medical advice”—that’s the point.

The authors mock Kennedy for telling Congress not to take medical advice from him. But that was not a disclaimer of responsibility—it was a reaffirmation of principled leadership.

Unlike the previous HHS secretaries who made sweeping pronouncements underpinned by selective and often misleading data, Kennedy’s stance is wait for the vaccine enterprise to produce sufficiently rigorous, well-powered studies before forming policy, and to defer individual medical decisions to physicians and restore scientific integrity at the policy level.

In context, he said: “Don’t take my advice—look at the data. Consult your doctor. Demand transparency.” That is exactly what a responsible official should do. It’s the opposite of Faucism, who made up medical practice on masking, on social distancing, and on lockdowns based on exactly zero evidence.

3. “CDC and ACIP are the gold standard”? They have a track record of error.

The authors appeal to institutional authority, claiming that for six decades HHS has relied on CDC and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). But reliance on a process is not the same as demonstrated performance.

Consider:

• ACIP recommended Covid vaccines for toddlers without evidence of clinical efficacy, relying instead on surrogate markers (see the FDA VRBPAC minutes, 2022).

• CDC promoted the claim that vaccines would “prevent transmission,” a statement later retracted—but only after public trust had eroded.

• Neither CDC nor ACIP has ever required inert placebo-controlled trials for pediatric vaccines on the schedule, despite clear standards for pharmacological safety.

The institutions the authors champion are not neutral or infallible. They have been actors with track records, agendas, and regulatory capture vulnerabilities—particularly during the pandemic, when data transparency was sacrificed for policy uniformity.

4. “Sudden pronouncements”? No—this is a long-overdue correction.

The assertion that Kennedy’s position came out of nowhere is ahistorical. The emergency-use vaccine policy was itself a sudden deviation from scientific norms, implemented before completion of Phase 3 trials in pregnant women, and rolled into pediatric recommendations before long-term safety data existed.

The status quo was rushed. Kennedy’s call for reevaluation is not a disruption—it’s a restoration of deliberative process. It is going to take time for the randomized trials and their long-term safety outcomes. Public health decisions should evolve with the evidence, not ossify into dogma.

5. “He didn’t consult CDC experts.” That’s not disqualifying—it’s necessary.

The authors criticize Kennedy for excluding CDC immunization personnel from a video appearance. But public health accountability does not begin and end at the CDC. It includes NIH, FDA, independent researchers, and above all, the public.

CDC leadership has been repeatedly caught misrepresenting data, stonewalling FOIA requests, and altering definitions midstream. Most notably, their refusal to release V-safe data to the public until compelled by a lawsuit speaks volumes. In 2021, The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) filed multiple FOIA requests starting in 2021 requesting access to V-safe data. The CDC responded by refusing to release the raw data, prompting ICAN to file a federal lawsuit. After legal pressure, in September 2022, the CDC was ordered to release the data. The first tranche was released shortly thereafter.

Consulting other experts outside CDC is not an act of defiance—it’s an act of due diligence in an environment where trust in CDC has been justifiably eroded - by the CDC.

It is also telling that the authors of the opinion piece fail to speculate on whether Kennedy has better, more independent, and less captured people than those at ACIP and other vaccine committees upon which he can count to never willfully mislead him.

6. Conflicts of interest? Let’s be honest about the authors.

Sara Rosenbaum is a former member of the ACIP. Richard Hughes IV is a former vice president of public policy at Moderna—a company whose vaccine profits soared during the pandemic. Both now assert authority over policies that benefited the institutions with which they were affiliated, yet they disclose none of these as material conflicts in their critique.

This undermines their claim to neutrality. Kennedy’s critics are not defending evidence-based science—they are defending the processes and structures they helped build and from which they derived professional capital.

7. The real danger: defending bad policy under the guise of tradition.

Perhaps the greatest irony in Rosenbaum and Hughes’ argument is that they accuse Kennedy of undermining public trust—when it was the overpromising, underperforming, and corporately harmonized policy they defend that did the actual damage.

There is nothing more dangerous to trust in policy and in medicine than codifying error and cloaking it in process. The public now has a massive, distributed intelligentsia network at work every day keeping tabs on the “authorities” who seek to run their lives. This isn’t 2020, people.

Conclusion: Science Must Be Correctable, and Policy Must be Based on the Most Reliable and Relevant Evidence

Kennedy is not issuing “evidence-free” guidance. He is doing what public health should have done from the beginning: ask whether the benefits outweigh the risks, transparently and openly, and revise recommendations accordingly.

The authors’ argument—that we should blindly follow the same process that led us into evidence-optional territory—is not only circular. It’s profoundly unscientific.

The era of policy-by-fiat must end. The era of accountability, pluralism, and evidence-based deliberation must begin.

And that is exactly what Secretary Kennedy is finally initiating.

For those who unhappy that he is recommending vaccines for the sick and injured, I want to remind you that these are very types of people who were left out of clinical trials. Requiring the vaccine manufacturing to “show us the data”.