The Epidemiologists Are Running for Office

In his run for governor of Maine, Nirav Shah holds standard Democratic positions. He aims, his campaign says, “to fix housing, fund health care, feed kids, and fuel growth, while fighting back against the overreaches of the Trump administration.” But Shah’s background is less conventional: In addition to being a lawyer, he’s an epidemiologist who directed Maine’s CDC during the coronavirus pandemic and was the principal deputy director of the federal CDC until earlier this year. Shah decided to resign from the CDC in part because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation as the secretary of health and human services. If he wins in 2026—a big if this early in the race—Shah suspects that he might be one of the first, if not the first, top CDC officials to secure such a prominent elected office.

Many science and health professionals have shied away from politics in the past. But as the Trump administration has rescinded its support for scientific research, restricted vaccine access, dismissed expert advisers, attacked doctors and scientists, and worked to curtail health-insurance coverage, researchers and health-care workers have had a surge of interest in running for office. Shaughnessy Naughton, the president of 314 Action, a political-action committee focused on electing Democrats with science backgrounds, told me that since January her team has seen almost 700 applications for candidate guidance, training, or funding, about seven times what the group would expect during an election off year.

Some of that interest has already translated into active campaigns. Candidates running in 2026 elections include a mathematician and a microbiologist, along with multiple pediatricians and former health officials. They are entering crowded races, in which even the primaries are months away. But many of these candidates argue that amid the administration’s attacks, voters will want to support scientifically minded politicians who can help fill the gaps in expertise that the nation’s leaders have left. Several told me that they specifically began their campaigns after Kennedy was confirmed and began to remake U.S. vaccine policy.

The number of candidates with science or health backgrounds is one more indication of how these fields are being forced to reckon with their role in the current political landscape. Plenty of science professionals still argue that their work shouldn’t be political. “Let’s get the politics out of public health,” Daniel Jernigan, who directed the CDC’s center for emerging and zoonotic diseases before resigning in protest of HHS’s approach to health policy, said at a rally in August. At the same time, the Trump administration’s attacks have created a political opening that many health and science experts are taking, even if it means politicizing science further.

Science and health representation in elected office is sparse: 3 percent of state legislators are scientists, engineers, or health-care professionals, according to Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. The majority of those politicians are Republicans, Eagleton data show; so are most of the STEM professionals currently in Congress. But as groups, both scientists and, at least in recent years, doctors have leaned liberal, and many of those now motivated to speak out against the Trump administration are Democrats, Kristoffer Shields, the director of Eagleton’s Center on the American Governor, told me. Hawaii’s Josh Green, the only Democratic physician currently serving in a state governorship, gained prominence during the coronavirus pandemic, when he advanced proactive mitigation measures as lieutenant governor. (This year, Green partnered with 314 Action to launch a $25 million campaign to elect 100 new Democratic physicians to office by 2030; he is up for reelection next year.)

Some science-minded candidates are entering electoral politics for the first time. For New Jersey’s Tina Shah (no relation to Nirav), an ICU physician now running for the U.S. House of Representatives, the push was the Trump administration’s approach to health care: She told me that she now regularly encounters patients who can’t afford medication or who are being denied coverage for important procedures. Others have made bids for public office before, including Abdul El-Sayed, a former health director with an M.D., who ran, unsuccessfully, for the Democratic nomination to Michigan’s governorship in 2018. He feels more confident in his current bid for U.S. Senate because the second Trump administration has made the harms of inaccessible care even more visible. He is gaining some traction: In the most recent quarter, he raised close to $1.8 million, the second-highest amount in his Democratic primary. Tina Shah, meanwhile, has raised more money from donors in a single quarter than any other Democrat in her district.

After the pediatrician Annie Andrews lost a congressional race in 2022, “I had no intention of running again,” she told me—then she changed her mind after watching Kennedy rise to the top of HHS. Andrews is running to unseat Lindsey Graham in the U.S. Senate, but she said she has found success in casting Kennedy—arguably the country’s most polarizing health secretary to date—as an opponent, too: “The more I speak out against the absurdity of RFK Jr. and his recent actions, the more traction I am getting.” For Richard Pan, a pediatrician and former California state senator, Kennedy’s threat is less abstract: When Pan was working on legislation that would make school vaccine exemptions harder to get, Kennedy, one of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists, traveled twice to Sacramento to oppose those measures, he told me. Pan’s now running for Congress in part to counteract Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies at the federal level.

Many of the candidates I spoke with have considered just how much they want to lean into their credentials. For voters worried about health-insurance coverage or the future of research in the United States, scientists, health-care workers, and public-health experts may have particular appeal right now, Shields told me. Still, several of the candidates I spoke with told me they weren’t running “on an explicit science platform,” as Nirav Shah put it. The candidates I interviewed were all critical of Kennedy, but several were reluctant to fixate on him, arguing (as any politician might) that voters care more about changes that directly benefit their community.

In Nirav Shah’s view, behaving as though health and science are severed from politics is “a nonstarter.” As the Trump administration has worked to dismantle its own health agencies, members of Congress have fought to keep some of those agencies’ budgets intact. And as the administration has dismissed expert scientific advisers, state and municipal leaders have stepped in: 15 governors, for instance, recently announced the formation of a public-health alliance to dictate policy that diverges from the federal government’s. Although the coalition bills itself as nonpartisan, all of the participating governors are Democrats.

Under Donald Trump’s leadership, polarization around several scientific issues has deepened. The administration argues that research has been corrupted by ideology and claims that it’s restoring “gold-standard science.” Polls suggest that Republicans have been more supportive than Democrats of new restrictions on vaccine recommendations and research-funding cuts. If some Democrats are making an issue of the Trump administration’s record on health and science, so are Republicans. At least one Republican doctor running for the U.S. House has played up his opposition to mRNA vaccines; some members of Congress with health backgrounds who are running for reelection have embraced Trump-administration criticisms of COVID-era policies and gender-affirming care for children.

Several health and science professionals remain skeptical that getting into politics in any way will help their cause. Jernigan, the former CDC official, told me his call to “get the politics out of public health” at the rally meant that, for health policy, politics shouldn’t supersede evidence, not that politics can be fully extracted from public health, he told me. At the same time, he noted that enmeshing science and politics too deeply risks casting evidence and the practice of research as the business of only one political party. “Perhaps we are in a situation where there needs to be a more vocal, assertive public-health voice,” Jernigan told me. “But does it have to translate into political office? I don’t think so.”

And yet, the perception of public-health overreach has been a radicalizing force among Trump supporters; whether through electoral politics or not, any attempt to fight the administration’s actions may bolster its narrative that scientists have been corrupted by liberal ideology. When I asked candidates whether their campaigns might deepen partisan divides in attitudes toward science, many of them skirted the question—and few offered answers when asked how they’d cope with that reality. Instead, candidates told me that they felt fairly boxed in. “Politics came for us,” Andrews said. “You can’t fight bad politics by staying apolitical.”