{"id":4721,"date":"2025-10-14T22:05:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T22:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/4721\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T22:05:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T22:05:24","slug":"sacramento-pro-vaccine-democrat-enters-race-to-replace-rep-kevin-kiley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/4721\/","title":{"rendered":"Sacramento pro-vaccine Democrat enters race to replace Rep. Kevin Kiley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Pan, a pediatrician who made national headlines for leading California<\/a>\u2018s effort to eliminate religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates, announced his candidacy for the state\u2019s 3rd Congressional District on Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pan, a Democrat, will be running against Rep. Kevin Kiley<\/a> (R-CA), a two-term congressman at risk of having his district redrawn to be more Democratically favored if Proposition 50<\/a>, a controversial redistricting ballot measure, is approved by voters on Nov. 4.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"InIn this Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019 file photo, state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, speaks on a bill before lawmakers in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo\/Rich Pedroncelli, File)<\/p>\n

Pan is hoping to hold Kiley accountable for supporting President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill,\u201d\u00a0which could result in millions of Americans losing health coverage under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see a federal government that seems to be intentionally attacking health care, whether it\u2019s taking away people\u2019s health insurance, undermining public health to allow disease to spread, or cutting research for things like cancer treatments,\u201d Pan told<\/a>\u00a0CalMatters\u00a0in an interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pan is a former state senator from the Sacramento area. He was born in New York and raised in Pittsburgh by parents who immigrated from Taiwan. Pan graduated with his Master of Public Health degree from Harvard in 1998 and moved to Sacramento to accept a faculty position at the University of California. <\/p>\n

He is known for writing some of California\u2019s toughest vaccine mandates and said it was U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s recommendation to loosen those mandates that pushed him to jump into the congressional race.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2015, Pan wrote a law that no longer permitted philosophical and religious beliefs to be used as a reason to exempt school children from state vaccine requirements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Four years later, he wrote another law that gave the California Department of Public Health the power to go after doctors who granted more than five childhood vaccine exemptions in a year. The Health Department was also given the go-ahead to look into public schools that had vaccination rates less than 95%. His bills drew huge protests at the Capitol in Sacramento, including one that involved an anti-vaccine demonstrator who threw a menstrual cup filled with blood off the balcony of the Senate chamber\u2019s visitors\u2019 gallery and onto senators sitting below.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI had blood thrown at me and got assaulted on the street, but I didn\u2019t back down,\u201d Pan said of the bills he proposed, adding that Americans, \u201cshould be very disturbed and concerned and worried\u201d about Kennedy\u2019s leadership.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pan ran for Sacramento mayor in 2024 but did not make it past the primary election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS ADDRESS GROWING CONSPIRACY THEORIES TIED TO PROPOSITION 50 BALLOTS<\/a><\/p>\n

He joins\u00a0Democrats Tyler Vandenberg, a former \u201cJeopardy!\u201d winner and Marine Corps veteran, and Heidi Hall, Nevada County supervisor, who launched campaigns earlier this year to unseat Kiley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kiley, a 40-year-old former high school English teacher, described the\u00a0redistricting battles sweeping across California as \u201ca direct attack on democracy\u201d and told the\u00a0Washington Examiner\u00a0they set a dangerous precedent and trample on the will of the people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kiley believes even if his district is redrawn, he will be able to convince voters he is the right candidate for the job.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Pan, a pediatrician who made national headlines for leading California\u2018s effort to eliminate religious exemptions to school…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[1400,7,4797,991,121,123,122,5405],"class_list":{"0":"post-4721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-2026-elections","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-kevin-kiley","11":"tag-redistricting","12":"tag-sacramento","13":"tag-sacramento-headlines","14":"tag-sacramento-news","15":"tag-vaccines"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}