House candidate aims to take vaccine fight to RFK’s door

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Hello and welcome back to Capitol Confidential! 

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend, which I know was a welcome reprieve for many Capitol staffers after brutal back-to-back long days last week. 

Just as the Labor Day holiday signals the end of summertime, it’s also the final punctuation to the legislature’s busy season, and a turn to campaign time.

When he was a state legislator, Democratic pediatrician Richard Pan crafted some of California’s strictest — and most controversial — vaccine laws.

The bills sparked vicious battles and rowdy protests from anti-vaccine groups, as the Chronicle’s Hannah Wiley reports. It also drew a big-name opponent in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pitting the pediatrician against the then-anti-vaxx activist in legislative fights in 2015 and 2019. 

Now, Pan is running for Congress, setting the stage for new clashes with RFK as the administration’s head of Health and Human Services. 

Pan blames Kennedy for contributing to surging vaccine skepticism and a swell in cases nationwide, arguing that the health secretary’s rhetoric has contributed to a recent dip in childhood immunization rates.

The pair’s feud began in 2015 over SB277, Wiley reported, a law Pan wrote that eliminated the personal belief exemption from the list of reasons parents can skip shots for their kids. Pan introduced the bill after a measles outbreak at Disneyland that started in December 2014 and infected 131 Californians.  

Kennedy took on a prominent role in the opposition campaign, helping to draw hundreds of moms and their children who flocked to the Capitol in protest of the mandates.

But that wasn’t their only head-to-head. The two men brawled again four years later in 2019, when Pan passed SB276 to crack down on a rise in medical vaccine exemptions among school children. Kennedy showed up again at the Capitol that summer to testify against the bill.

Pan’s opponent in November’s congressional election, incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley, is among those who have criticized Pan’s vaccination legislation, taking issue with the government intervening in medical care decisions.

Kiley, who voted against SB276 when he was in the state Assembly, claimed Pan is partially responsible for the decline in routine childhood vaccines “because of the radical policies” he pushed in the Legislature, Wiley reported. Kiley in particular criticized a bill Pan wrote in 2022 to require the COVID vaccine for kids to return to classrooms, legislation that ultimately failed.

Pan has an advantage against Kiley, even after he shirked the Republican Party for an independent label, in a race for the redrawn Sacramento-area district that leans heavily blue.

Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, took to social media last week to express her disappointment that her housing bill died in the Senate – not over a lack of votes, but because time ran out. 

“Critical components were amended out Friday & it was ultimately held by the Senate late last night — missing the midnight deadline for concurrence,” Wicks wrote. 

The bill, AB1903, was billed as a reform to liability standards pertaining to defects in new home construction. Supporters, including the influential group California YIMBY, say the bill would have given owners and builders an easier route to repair defects in homes. 

It’s not the first time a bill has died over poor timing (or perhaps, poor time management) in the hours before the end-of-session cutoff. 

In 2020, then-Speaker Toni Atkins' priority housing bill of the year, SB1120, died because legislators in the Senate didn’t have enough time to call a vote in the minutes leading up to the midnight constitutional deadline. 

Other bills that made it through the brutal appropriations process, only to die in the waning days of session? There’s a handful. They include SB1259, by Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, which would have required refiners to provide reports on expected costs and obligations if their facilities close. 

“I fought hard to get this bill passed, despite strong opposition from the oil and gas industry, because I believe oil refineries should follow similar disclosure requirements about the cost of cleaning up their facilities as other sectors of the energy industry already do,” Blakespear said in a statement the last day of session.

From Sen. Jesse Arreguín, D-Oakland, SB739 was also placed on the inactive file in the session’s final days. The bill proposed adjusting the California Clean Miles Standard and Incentive Program for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft by creating new annual targets and goals starting in 2029 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The decision to pause the bill comes after the release of a report by the California Public Utilities Commission advising a delay in implementing the program after finding several “economic disruptions” that needed to be addressed.

Assembly Members Liz Ortega, D-San Leandro and Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, teamed up for a Tuesday press conference to urge the governor to sign their bills related to detention center operators. 

Ortega’s AB2465 would bar companies connected to private immigration detention operations from receiving certain California tax benefits and public contracts. Haney’s AB1633 would impose a 25 percent tax on private immigration detention centers and direct the revenue to fund immigration-related services.

The two Bay Area lawmakers say the bills would be the first of their kind in the country if signed into law, describing them as a unique way states can leverage their tax code to respond to the administration's immigration and detention crackdown.

“While there's not a whole lot we could do when it comes to federal laws, there’s definitely something we can do with our tax state dollars,” Ortega said Tuesday.

Newsom has until the end of the month to either sign or veto the bills. 

Questions? Thoughts? Interesting tidbits to share? Reach out at [email protected], and follow me on X, @KathrynPlmr.