Mother Jones illustration; Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMA
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Richard Pan is no stranger to blood. As a pediatrician, he was trained for its inevitability. But unlike your average medical professional—and despite his approachable and buoyant demeanor—he’s had menstrual blood launched at him in protest. He’s been assaulted on the street by a person livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He’s been the subject of racist memes comparing him to Asian despots. He’s encountered demonstrators clad in t-shirts depicting his face smeared with blood. He’s gotten plenty of death threats, too.
Oh, and by the way, he’s running for Congress.
What’s with the hate? Most of it stems from the fact that during his tenure as a California state senator, Pan authored some of the nation’s strongest vaccine laws. In 2015, he introduced legislation that nixed the ability of parents to use “personal beliefs” to exempt their children from the routine immunizations required for public school enrollment. Four years later, he wrote a bill cracking down on fraudulent medical exemptions for vaccines, which passed despite protesters’ clamorous attempts to shut down the Legislature. “They brought the militia to the capital,” Pan recalls.
“I like to say I met RFK Jr. twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times.”
“When we came out of the hearing room, I was shaken by the level of vitriol, and I was almost in tears—but Dr. Pan was so calm,” says Leah Russin, a parent who, concerned about high rates of vaccine exemptions in California schools, began working with Pan to generate support for the 2015 bill.
Opponents had been bussed in from around the state—mostly mothers who described their children as “vaccine-injured”—to address lawmakers in Sacramento. As anti-vax firebrands yelled into the microphone and religious leaders promised imprecatory prayers, Pan stood and listened calmly. “It was like the ocean lapping against a wall without eroding it at all,” Russin remembers.
This scene repeated in 2019, but escalated to include the blood throwing and even a bodily assault. “It was the roots of what we now call the MAHA movement,” Russin says, and Pan endured their “crucible.”
Pan, now 60, his dark hair peppered with gray, ditched his usual coat and tie for our interview, opting for a crisp blue Oxford shirt. He has never been too rattled by the vitriol, he tells me: “When you resort to violence, then I think you’ve already admitted you’ve lost the argument.”
After four years in the California Assembly and 12 in the state Senate, Pan termed out and took a hiatus from politics—returning to his teaching post at UC Davis School of Medicine. But the rise of the vehemently anti-vaccine Make America Healthy (MAHA) movement and its erratic figurehead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has compelled him to jump into the national ring, where his résumé, unflappability, and knowledge of vaccine science and its deniers make him uniquely qualified to push back.
Pan in 2024, during a Sacramento Bee-KVIE mayoral forum.Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMA
Having tousled with the anti-vax movement for decades, Pan has watched it shift from a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalists and lefty hippie types toward a more violent, right-leaning contingent obsessed with personal freedoms and urged along by peddlers of bogus cures. “As a physician,” he says, “I learned a lot about both the diseases and the vaccinations themselves, but I had to learn more about this anti-vaccine—not just ideology, but all their myths.”
Suddenly, “the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”
This knowledge, he believes, is his best weapon against vaccine dissenters, including RFK Jr., who butted heads personally with Pan after showing up in Sacramento to argue against his public health bills. “I like to say I met him twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times,” Pan says. The first time was a true debate; the second not so much. During a hearing on his 2019 bill, other anti-vax witnesses didn’t leave enough time for Kennedy to speak. Sitting next to the pediatrician, he grumbled something, whereupon Pan said, “It’s not my fault. You know that your guys didn’t figure this out.”
A 15-minute slot on the floor of the California Senate is one thing, but Kennedy has since gained a powerful national platform—watching him spew misinformation during a raucous four-hour Senate hearing last September served as the final straw for Pan’s return to politics. Soon after, Pan announced he would run for the House of Representatives, challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley in California’s Third congressional district.
The Third District contained a sliver of left-leaning Sacramento, where Pan lives, along with a large tract of the more conservative Eastern Sierras. But he’d flipped a Republican seat during his first bid for elected office. Maybe he could do it again? Plus, Gov. Gavin Newsom was mounting a campaign to redraw California’s electoral map in response to an aggressive gerrymandering effort by Texas Republicans. The political landscape Pan was launching himself into was about to be overhauled.
The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Pan was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Pittsburgh. He knew he wanted to be a doctor since the third grade, he remembers, after he read a book from the school library about (of all things) blood. It took another few decades for him to find his penchant for politics, but he began straying from the conventional med-school track while studying biophysics at Johns Hopkins in the late-1980s.
He had taken up a genetics research project between semesters, but another lab published findings that made it moot. “Oh, great, now I have to find a new project for the summer,” Pan recalls thinking.
That’s how he began working with Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy who needed help collecting data for a book on how Medicare can fail to meet the needs of people with multiple chronic diseases. “I would have never anticipated him going into politics,” Anderson told me.
The trauma of ICE’s abuses isn’t limited to “the person it happened to,” Pan says. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it.”
Pan had people skills, his former mentor recalls, but was overly focused on the details. “In biophysics, you’re dealing with very minute, specific topics,” Anderson explains. But as Pan delved deeper into the work, “all of a sudden the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”
Pan likes to say that he traded a micro view of health for a macro one: “We need people to discover the next great cure. We also need people to work on being sure people can get access to those great cures.”
To that end, he spent his summers during medical school on rotation with the Commissioned Corps of US Public Health Service, which places medical professionals in regions of the country that are experiencing public health crises. His first assignment was in a Pennsylvania trucking town, where the locals weren’t too concerned with infectious disease; they wanted officials to address an epidemic of domestic violence. The next year, the Commissioned Corps dropped him into a Philadelphia-area clinic at the center of a measles outbreak fueled by fundamentalist churches whose congregations refused to vaccinate their children. These experiences, Pan says, “really made me think about social determinants of health before that name was popular.”
This public-health lens informed his work on a range of policies, even ones with seemingly no medical connection. His core issues as a state legislator, including affordability, housing, and violence prevention, are also prominent features of his House campaign—as is countering President Donald Trump. But Pan says he doesn’t view his opposition to the administration’s agenda as separate from his medical obligations.
Part of his work as a pediatrician—he continues to treat low-income children at the Sacramento County Health Center—is to determine whether his young patients have experienced trauma. Because unaddressed, trauma is itself a risk factor for the kinds of chronic diseases RFK Jr. and Trump promised to tackle. (In fact, the administration has slashed research grants to scientists who study them.) And now, on Trump’s watch, we have “armed, masked agents going around breaking into people’s houses without warrants, breaking into people’s cars, children worried that their parents may not be home when they come home from school,” Pan says. “Think about the chronic impact of that trauma.”
“It’s not just to the person it happened to,” he adds. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it—that our own federal government is in defiance of our Constitution.”
There’s no shortage of ways to portray the second Trump administration as a threat to people’s wellbeing, but its detrimental actions on vaccines and health coverage, in Pan’s view, are only a part of why medical professionals should feel obliged speak out. Because policies that make people fear for their rights and freedoms constitute their own public health crisis.
The anti-vaxxer stalking Pan wore a t-shirt depicting Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” sprayed across his glasses.
Congress has its share of physician members, but the majority of the 20 currently serving are Republicans. And most have supported Trump despite his detrimental public health policies and appointees. The Senate’s four MDs all voted to confirm RFK Jr., for example. But the rise of MAHA and the Republican gutting of Medicaid have prompted other doctors to launch Democratic congressional bids—counting Pan, at least three are running in California.
After voters approved Newsom’s redistricting plan, the district Pan had planned to run in, the Third, suddenly tilted liberal. A game of musical chairs ensued. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, the incumbent in the adjoining Sixth District, announced a run in the Third. So Pan pounced on the Sixth.
His prospects look decent: 70 percent of voters in the newly drawn Sixth already know Pan pretty well—they’re his former constituents. And as the dust settled, Pan secured several key endorsements, including from the Sacramento Bee. Still, the race is anything but decided, especially now that Pan may get his match-up with a conservative incumbent.
Last month, Kiley announced he, too, would run in the Sixth—not as a Republican, but as an independent. His incumbency in the Third has given him a big money advantage. As of late March, per the most recent disclosure report, he’d raised nearly five times as much as Pan or Thien Ho, the Sacramento County district attorney who is also running as a Democrat and is slightly ahead of Pan in fundraising. But Kiley’s rebrand may not be enough to get him elected in the freshly left-leaning Sixth. He was endorsed by Trump in 2022, and has consistently voted with his conservative colleagues in the House.
In some ways, the challenges Pan will face in Congress if elected are not that different from what he confronted as a state legislator. He drafted the 2015 vaccine bill in response to a nonfatal measles outbreak in Disneyland, then the largest since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the virus eliminated in the US. But that outbreak was only about 3 percent as big as the ongoing wave, which has resulted in 4,080 confirmed cases, 344 hospitalizations, and three deaths since the beginning of 2025. Roughly 93 percent of those afflicted were unvaccinated.
A few months into Trump’s first term, Pan and Russin got on a plane to attend the first March for Science in DC. They weren’t the only envoys from California’s vaccine wars. As they ambled down the National Mall with the rest of the procession, two familiar faces caught up. One was Joshua Coleman, a prominent anti-vaxxer from the Sacramento suburbs, and the other was Pan’s: Coleman’s sign and t-shirt bore a depiction of Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” spray painted across his glasses.
Coleman has been a “perennial person,” Russin told me. Even after getting into legal trouble, he kept popping up, sometimes donning Star Wars themed costumes that obscured his identity. He followed Pan throughout the march, shouting accusations and documenting his actions for a 30-minute highlight reel he later published on YouTube. At the end of the video, Coleman stands on a DC sidewalk in the rain, beaming: “I ruined his day!”
Well, maybe. Much of the rest of the video consists of Pan strolling down the mall in his white coat, chatting with other science supporters and taking pictures with fellow physicians, despite Coleman hovering just a few feet behind. Beyond the occasional moment when Pan gestures towards the camera with a shrug, Coleman might as well be invisible—at least to Pan. Other science-minded demonstrators circle by with uneasy looks. A few bold ones block Coleman’s camera and ask him to leave.
All of this happened before anti-vax influencers helped convince nearly a third of Americans surveyed that childhood vaccines do more harm than good, before some of those right-wing skeptics were placed in key public health posts, and before Pan’s opponents began resorting to violence.
Yet though the political power dynamics have shifted immensely in a relatively brief period, Pan doesn’t plan to change how he responds. “To a certain degree,” he says, “some of the threats that I get are no longer about me. It’s about scaring other people, because they know I won’t give in.”
