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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.

“We need people in Congress who have the background, the training, the knowledge to basically hold this administration accountable,” Pan said last week on a baking 100-degree day in the Sacramento suburbs.

“I know what it’s like to be on the front lines,” said Pan, who spent a dozen years teaching and practicing pediatrics before being elected to the Assembly in 2010. “I’ve seen measles, right?”

In fact, his push to toughen vaccination requirements was spurred by a 2014-15 measles outbreak at Disneyland, which, at the time, was one of the largest and most significant epidemics to arise after the disease was supposedly eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.

Little did we know.

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.

Dr. Richard Pan meets Dr. Teah Harris-Johnson and her daughter before participating in a roundtable discussion at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

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.

“That’s essentially what scientists and physicians are,” Naughton said. “They are problem-solvers. and clearly our country is facing a lot of problems.”

Among those she cited was “the arsonist in charge of HHS.”

Pan has a history with Kennedy, who has long reigned as one of the country’s preeminent anti-vaxxers.

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.

Dr. Richard Pan sits between Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood and Sean Frame, a candidate for state Senate, at the maternal health roundtable.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

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.

Like his jury-rigged political persona, Kiley seems to want it both ways on vaccines.

Before going to Congress, while serving in the Assembly, Kiley voted against Pan’s legislation cracking down on fraudulent vaccine exemptions. He’s described vaccines as a vital public health tool, but condemned government mandates and suggested vaccination should be a matter of parental choice. He claims Pan has eroded public trust by politicizing the issue.

As for Kennedy, Kiley told the San Francisco Chronicle a lot of things “that I don’t agree with,” though he’s never called out the secretary for his cuckoo-land theories — vaccines cause autism, the fluoride in public water supplies is making Americans “stupider,” and many more — or denounced his destructive policies.

That passivity, Pan said, amounts to complicity.

“It’s not just simply a talking point,” Pan said of public health policy. “It’s reality and we need to have policy based on what’s really happening, not on some ideological conspiracy theory.”

Dr. Richard Pan participates in a discussion during a Black maternal health roundtable last week at Liberty Towers Church in Sacramento.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)

Pan’s campaign is focused on more than vaccines and RFK Jr.

Like most Democrats, he’s made affordability a key part of his candidacy, citing higher gas and grocery prices and, inevitably, the rising cost of healthcare and the roughly $1-trillion cut from Medicaid under last year’s Big Sop To Billionaires Bill.

The super-wealthy got tax cuts, Pan told a silver-haired audience at a 55-and-older community in Roseville, while the bill will make healthcare less accessible for millions and undermine both Medicare and Social Security. Kiley supported the legislation, the centerpiece of Trump’s second term. As a doctor and state lawmaker, Pan said, he worked to expand healthcare and address the needs of his community.

“We don’t pass laws to make lives harder,” Pan said. “That’s what he’s done.”

Later, at a forum on Black maternal health, Pan said Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the so-called war on woke ignores glaring disparities in the treatment of Black women versus other patients. “The data is there,” said Pan, speaking before a banner decorated with purple butterflies and the proclamation, “Black Mothers Matter.”

“The facts are there,” Pan went on. “It’s a very, very real problem and it needs to be addressed and it needs to be solved.”

He brought up, somewhat sheepishly, his campaign.

“That’s why I’m running,” Pan said, to “have another person in Congress … who’s going to tell the administration we are not going to bury DEI. We’re not going to bury disparities. These are real problems.”

As is the assault on science, the undermining of research and the promotion of nutty nostrums by those at the highest levels of the federal government.

Hopefully, the midterm election will begin the healing process.

Tom Kim topped the men’s leaderboard after the third round at the Asian Games as he seeks a gold medal that will significantly reduce the time he is required to spend in South Korea’s military.

Having started two shots off the lead, Kim hit a brilliant five-under 65 that included five birdies and an eagle, taking him a stroke clear at 12 under par with one round to play.

Able-bodied South Korean males are usually required to undertake between 18 and 21 months of military service before the age of 28.

However the government rewards Asian Games gold medals and Olympic medals of any colour with a service exemption bar basic training, which lasts less than a month.

Athletes who have previously secured the exemption include former Tottenham footballer Son Heung-min, who served for only three weeks in 2020 having won the Asian Games two years earlier.

Kim hurried from the Presidents Cup in the United States to tee off at the Kasugai Country Club in Japan, having to manage on just six hours of sleep and a 14-hour time difference.

The 24-year-old previously came close to securing an exemption at the Paris Olympics in 2024, finishing day one tied for third before ultimately finishing eighth.

Having looked visibly emotional after that result, Kim is now chasing another chance to stop military service stalling his promising career, which has already featured an Asian Tour order of merit crown and four PGA Tour titles.

The world number 32’s lead would have been larger had he not missed birdie putts on the 14th and 18th holes, but he stands clear of Taiwan’s Wang Wei-hsuan, who had led overnight, and Japan’s Kazuki Higa going into day four.

The men’s team event title offers another route for military exemption, with South Korea also topping the men’s leaderboard by one stroke.

Gold in that event will exempt Tom Kim and SH Kim, 28, regardless of the individual result, but it would come too late for the third team member, Mun Do-yeob, who has already served.

“I think about it. It’s so tough,” SH Kim said of the possibility of military service.

“I am 100% nervous, for sure. It’s a lot of pressure. I could stay on the PGA Tour (with a gold). That’s my goal.”

The resolution cites a ‘lack of accountability’ by Israel’s government and an ‘inability to secure justice’ by the US.

The United States Senate has blocked a resolution that would have required President Donald Trump’s administration to report on the killing of nine Americans in the occupied West Bank and on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children in military detention.

The resolution failed 47-53 on Tuesday, with senators voting largely along party lines.

It was brought to the floor by Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, and cited a “lack of accountability” from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an “inability to secure justice” from the US government.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Democrat to vote against advancing the resolution, while Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, joined Democrats in supporting it.

Van Hollen forced the vote under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which allows individual members of Congress to demand a formal State Department report on the human rights practices of any country that receives US security assistance.

“Violence is raging in the West Bank, & despite the deaths of nine Americans, the wrongful detention of even more, & the daily torment of Palestinians, we have no accountability from the U.S. or Israeli govt”, Van Hollen wrote on X before the resolution was brought to a vote.

Nine Americans killed

The resolution called for an unclassified report within 30 days of adoption. It would have detailed investigations into the deaths of the Americans, the treatment of US citizens held in Israeli prisons, and the conditions facing Palestinian children in Israeli military detention.

The measure cited the deaths of nine American citizens in the occupied West Bank since January 2022, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot in the head and killed in May 2022 while reporting in the city of Jenin.

It also included Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was shot in the head and killed by an Israeli soldier in September 2024, and Sayfollah Kamel Musallet, who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in July 2025.

The others were Amer Mohammad Saada Rabee, who was 14; Tawfic Abdel Jabbar and Mohamed Ahmad Alkhdour, both 17; Omar Assad; Khamid Ayyad; Nasrallah Abu Siyam; and Khamis Rabee Jabara.

The resolution also noted the arrests of several Palestinian-American children by Israeli forces.

Among them was Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old from Florida, who was arrested in February 2025 and held in pretrial detention for nine months without contact with his family. It noted that US embassy officials and lawyers who met him told his family that he had lost nearly a quarter of his body weight, contracted scabies, and was beaten and tortured.

Other Palestinian Americans who remain in custody include Adam Wajeh Abdelfattah Karakrah, 16, and Sama Safi, 20, a student detained in June in raids targeting students at Birzeit University.

The resolution cited rights groups that have documented the deaths of at least 44 Palestinians in Israeli military camps since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. Those groups, it said, have documented widespread abuses, including beatings, sexual violence, harassment and threats, “pointing to systemic and deliberate mistreatment”.

It also went on to note a sharp escalation in Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, and stressed that there have been no convictions for the killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli settlers since 2020.