3.14 Action Endorses 500-Plus Science Candidates as Ex-Lawmaker Richard Pan Runs for Congress

Richard Pan wrote some of the toughest vaccine laws in the country. He says it cost him.

The former California state senator was physically assaulted outside the Capitol in Sacramento and hit with blood thrown from the gallery. He also received death threats. Assaulting a lawmaker over a policy vote is a crime, and nobody should have to defend that point.

Now Pan teaches health policy at UC Davis and is running for Congress in the Sacramento suburbs. He told a reporter last week, on a 100-degree day, that he is running in part to take on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"We need people in Congress who have the background, the training, the knowledge to basically hold this administration accountable," Pan said.

From Disneyland to Capitol Hill

Pan spent a dozen years teaching and practicing pediatrics before voters sent him to the state Assembly in 2010. His push to tighten school vaccination requirements grew out of the 2014-15 measles outbreak that began at Disneyland. At the time it was among the largest outbreaks since the U.S. declared measles eliminated in 2000.

"I know what it's like to be on the front lines," Pan said. "I've seen measles, right?"

His record is a bet on stricter state vaccine rules. Mandates are a live argument about how much say parents get versus the state, and Pan sits firmly on the side of tighter requirements. That is the platform voters will weigh alongside his medical credentials.

The numbers behind the push

Pan is one of many candidates with scientific or medical training on the ballot this November, for school boards, city councils, state legislatures, the House and the U.S. Senate.

The political group 3.14 Action, named for the first digits of pi, has recruited and helped elect hundreds of candidates from STEM backgrounds. This year it has endorsed more than 500, Pan among them, including 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 the group in 2016. She had lost two bids for a congressional seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. She says that when she started, Capitol Hill had more talk radio hosts than scientists and engineers.

That has shifted only modestly. Nearly two dozen doctors and nurses sit in Congress now, and more than 30 have run this 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.

Measles and the Kennedy factor

Naughton spoke from Pennsylvania. LA Times political columnist Barabak describes the state as in the middle of the nation's worst measles outbreak in more than three decades. Barabak writes that Kennedy has downplayed its severity even as other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise.

Barabak ties the surge of science-minded candidates to Kennedy and to what he calls the hollowing out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Pan makes a similar case from the campaign trail, saying he is running in part to take on Kennedy, whom Barabak calls an "old nemesis" of Pan's, and accusing the Trump administration of damaging the public health system.

Those are the candidates' and the columnist's characterizations of Kennedy's tenure. The announced endorsement counts show that the candidates exist. They do not show how many will win, or whether voters see HHS policy as the issue that decides their races.

What a degree does and does not prove

A medical or science degree is a real qualification, and a Congress short on people who have worked in labs and clinics is a fair thing to want fixed. Merit counts.

But a résumé is not a platform. Plenty of credentialed experts have been wrong, and plenty of non-experts have asked the right questions. Pan's pitch rests on being a pediatrician who has seen measles up close. Voters will also be judging his legislative record and his positions on the vaccine mandates he wrote.

Pan's race, along with the 500-plus other endorsed campaigns, gets its answer in November. The count to watch is whether the nearly two dozen doctors and nurses now in Congress grow in number when the more than 30 who ran this cycle face voters.