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.

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,........

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