FOOTHILL FARMS, Calif. — As a California state lawmaker, Richard Pan authored some of the strongest vaccine laws in the country. His reward — and part of the backlash, on top of death threats — was being physically assaulted outside the Capitol in Sacramento and spattered with blood thrown from the gallery. Now, a few years removed from the state Senate and teaching health policy at UC Davis, Pan is running for Congress, in part to fight an old nemesis, the terminally misguided Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., and to arrest the Trump administration’s sledgehammering of the nation’s public healthcare system. Every action has an equal and opposition reaction, a law of physics that’s equally applicable to the realm of politics. Pan is part of a wave of doctors and scientists running for office this November — for school boards, city councils, state legislatures, the House and U.S.
Senate — owing in good part to Kennedy’s quackery and the hollowing out of such vital health and research agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. The political organization 3.14 Action — its name a decimal approximation of pi — has recruited and helped elect hundreds of candidates from STEM backgrounds (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and endorsed more than 500 of those running this year, including Pan in his race in Sacramento and in neighboring Placer and Yolo counties. Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who worked on drug discovery and breast cancer research, founded 3.14 Action in 2016 after two unsuccessful tries for a congressional seat in the Philadelphia suburbs.
When she started the organization, Naughton noted, there were more talk radio hosts on Capitol Hill than scientists and engineers. (Nearly two dozen doctors and nurses currently serve in Congress. More than 30 have run this election cycle.) “There isn’t an issue that doesn’t benefit by having fact-based decision-makers, people that will go into office as problem-solvers,” Naughton said from Pennsylvania, which is in the throes of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy has downplayed the severity, even as the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases is rising.
In 2015, he helped summon hundreds of demonstrators to Sacramento to protest Pan’s legislation tightening vaccination requirements. (Kennedy later apologized for using the word “holocaust” to condemn the proposed law, though he revisited the Nazi analogy during the COVID-19 pandemic.) In 2019, Kennedy returned to Sacramento to oppose another bill Pan authored, this one tightening the rules for vaccination exemptions. Again, he was joined by an army of protesters. Tensions peaked when a demonstrator threw a cup of blood from the spectators’ gallery onto the Senate floor, halting business for several hours before the bill passed.
Pan’s opponent in November is Rep. Kevin Kiley, a conservative Republican running as an independent. Seeking election in a Democratic-tilting district drawn under Proposition 50, the voter-passed gerrymander, Kiley has sought to distance himself from Trump and the MAGA movement, saying he would not caucus with GOP lawmakers if he returned to Washington.
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