Richard Pan, a pediatrician who made national headlines for leading California’s effort to eliminate religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates, announced his candidacy for the state’s 3rd Congressional District on Tuesday. 

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

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Pan is hoping to hold Kiley accountable for supporting President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which could result in millions of Americans losing health coverage under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. 

“We see a federal government that seems to be intentionally attacking health care, whether it’s taking away people’s health insurance, undermining public health to allow disease to spread, or cutting research for things like cancer treatments,” Pan told CalMatters in an interview. 

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.

He is known for writing some of California’s toughest vaccine mandates and said it was U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recommendation to loosen those mandates that pushed him to jump into the congressional race. 

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. 

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’s visitors’ gallery and onto senators sitting below. 

“I had blood thrown at me and got assaulted on the street, but I didn’t back down,” Pan said of the bills he proposed, adding that Americans, “should be very disturbed and concerned and worried” about Kennedy’s leadership. 

Pan ran for Sacramento mayor in 2024 but did not make it past the primary election. 

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He joins Democrats Tyler Vandenberg, a former “Jeopardy!” winner and Marine Corps veteran, and Heidi Hall, Nevada County supervisor, who launched campaigns earlier this year to unseat Kiley. 

Kiley, a 40-year-old former high school English teacher, described the redistricting battles sweeping across California as “a direct attack on democracy” and told the Washington Examiner they set a dangerous precedent and trample on the will of the people. 

Kiley believes even if his district is redrawn, he will be able to convince voters he is the right candidate for the job.