参议员候选人 El-Sayed 称要“拷问”RFK Jr.，称其为“史上最无能的 HHS 部长”

Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t make headlines as the Senate candidate who wrote a book on applying systems science to public health, or who worked to rebuild Detroit’s health system, or who researched the ways social circumstances can impact maternal mortality. 

With six days left in his bruising, contentious campaign, El-Sayed is known for his comical social media videos, his advocacy of “Medicare for All” and his controversial stance on U.S. policy toward Israel. As the man Vice President JD Vance called “a little weasel.” As the Egyptian-American who President Trump has said would “open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

But El-Sayed’s medical and public health background is likely to figure prominently if he is elected as a senator from Michigan. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has pitched El-Sayed as the future standard-bearer for Medicare for All, the policy Sanders popularized in the American consciousness. He would be the first epidemiologist to make it to the upper house, and the first holder of a medical degree to represent the Democratic party in the Senate since 1969. He would also be the first Muslim senator. 

And at a moment when there is no clear challenger to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the agencies that are the bedrock of public health, he is the candidate many supporters hope will push back. 

“Public health is really under attack now, and the situation really needs response. Currently there is almost no public health person in the administration,” said Alfredo Morabia, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who taught El-Sayed in a class on the history of public health while El-Sayed was earning his doctoral degree. 

As a second-generation immigrant, a federally funded health equity researcher, a former local public health director, and an evangelist for single-payer health care, El-Sayed stands for much that is under siege by the Trump administration. 

El-Sayed’s time in academia and health departments, and his description of himself as a doctor, have come under scrutiny during this race. His opponent, former FBI agent and Republican representative Mike Rogers, has repeatedly attacked El-Sayed for not being “a real doctor.” While El-Sayed has both a DPhil and an M.D., he never completed a medical residency, and cannot see patients. Rogers has also criticized El-Sayed’s Medicare for All proposal, saying it would force Americans to ration care while raising costs. 

On Monday, at an event with Rogers, Kennedy said “there’s 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don’t produce science.” He went on to say “they don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields prize.” (The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to honor outstanding mathematical achievement.)

El-Sayed responded in an interview with STAT Wednesday that “it’s ironic to hear a guy who’s trafficked in eugenicist terms, who rejects science outright, come to Michigan to lecture voters about an Arab American scientist with two doctoral degrees who believes in science, like vaccines.”

He said he views Kennedy as “truly the most incompetent HHS secretary we’ve ever had.”

Beyond advocating Medicare for All legislation, El-Sayed has said he would seek an assignment to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which sets budgets for the Department of Health and Human Services. 

From that position, El-Sayed has said, he “can’t wait to sit across [from] RFK Jr. and actually grill him.” He told STAT he is “looking forward to sitting down with public health leaders and scientists and researchers … and being ready with a package on day one in 2029 for the next Democratic administration to start building what we need.”

In the meantime, he said he would be holding the Trump administration “accountable for all of the failures.” 

But El-Sayed also shares some priorities with the current administration. His platform includes capping overhead costs for universities receiving federal research funding and finding ways to incentivize high-risk, high-impact scientific research. 

If there is a silver lining in the Trump administration’s remaking of the federal health agencies, El-Sayed told STAT, it’s that “we get an opportunity, I think, right now, to build what we need.”

At the National Institutes of Health, he said, that means ensuring that funding goes to projects that are responsive to the needs of Americans, rewarding new ideas, and shoring up training programs. At the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, he wants to speed up drug approvals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, El-Sayed said, must be “more responsive to the future.”

Many who knew El-Sayed in academia in the 2010s sensed his frustration with the pace at which research can help those most in need. That pushed El-Sayed toward the centers of power, where he believed he could have more impact, though some of his critics have questioned how much he changed in his short time leading public health departments. 

El-Sayed ran the Detroit health department for nearly two years before launching a failed bid for governor of Michigan in 2018. He later led the separate public health agency in Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit and some of its suburbs, until again leaving to pursue his political ambitions. His allies hope 2026 can be his moment. 

“This guy, man, he just has this energy about him that just gets people around him excited,” said Katelyn Jetelina, the founder and CEO of Your Local Epidemiologist, who joined El-Sayed as a co-host on his podcast, “America, Dissected,” at the end of 2024. Part of his appeal, she said, is that he envisions an improved public health system, rather than one that simply attempts to walk back changes the Trump administration has enacted. 

“He’s not just complaining, but coming up with solutions,” Jetelina said. 

Shaped by his immigrant identity

El-Sayed was born in Rochester Hills, Mich., in 1984 to two Egyptian immigrants. His father came to the United States to attend graduate school at Wayne State University and then became an engineer, while his mother worked as a nurse practitioner. 

El-Sayed often recounts visiting his teta, or grandmother, in Kardasah, Egypt, where he was exposed to some of the inequities he would later try to address. “You can imagine me walking into that apartment, my hat backward with my American kid swagger,” El-Sayed said at a campaign event in Kalamazoo, Mich., in September 2025. “You can imagine her pointing to one of my cousins, ‘That one is smarter than you.’ Points to the next one: ‘I don’t have to tell you, is taller and better looking.’ Points to a third one: ‘Nicer, kinder-hearted. Fourth one is more athletic, fifth one works harder than you.’” 

“By the end of this, I am like ‘Teta, what do I have going for me?’ and she’s like, ‘Habibi, [my beloved, in Arabic] you have the best thing of all.’ And I am like ‘What’s that?’ She goes ‘You get to go back to America at the end of the summer.”

In his memoir, “Healing Politics,” El-Sayed refers to this as a “matched-pair epidemiological study of sorts.” The difference between him and his cousins, he writes, is privilege: clean water, political rights, and life in a high-income country. Being able to witness what poverty looks like, and having the ability to address it, he said, is something he viewed as a “profound responsibility.” 

His identity would also spark his foray into academic research. Like many Muslim-Americans, El-Sayed saw the 9/11 terror attacks change his reception in the predominantly white suburb where he lived. A high school student at the time, he endured racial slurs, was bullied by other students on the football field and told to “go back to your own country.” It’s a line of attack that has extended to the current campaign. 

His opponent, Rogers, wrote in a statement the day after the Aug. 10 Democratic primary that “never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.” There is no record of El-Sayed saying that. 

By his senior year at the University of Michigan in 2007, El-Sayed would be named valedictorian of his class, and was bound for medical school in Ann Arbor. He hoped to combine his growing interest in politics with academic training in the medical sciences.

The path to merging those two passions seemingly presented itself after El-Sayed sat down with Sandro Galea, a professor of epidemiology at the school who studied the ways social factors impacted health outcomes. El-Sayed asked to volunteer in Galea’s lab to learn the ropes of social science research. Unfortunately, Galea told El-Sayed, he didn’t take volunteers and didn’t have funding for another research assistant.

El-Sayed was undeterred. He showed up the next morning to Galea’s lab and told him, “I’m ready to work.” The two went on to collaborate for years, and two decades later, Galea is still a mentor. 

“I think everything he’s done has been evidence of his hard work, strategic hard work,” said Galea, who now leads the Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis.

Early in El-Sayed’s apprenticeship in Galea’s lab, he read a paper on the effect of intensified Islamophobia on birth outcomes in the wake of 9/11 in California, which found that the risks for preterm birth and low birth weight infants increased for women of Arabic descent, but had not for any other group. 

“In that paper, science, social science, and my own life experiences collided in a way I had never known was possible. It was exhilarating and devastating at the same time,” El-Sayed wrote of the study in his memoir. 

In 2008, El-Sayed was chosen for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which would take him to England’s University of Oxford for two years of  research. While there, he worked on using AI-based modeling to simulate the many social factors that created racial disparities in rates of obesity in England.

El-Sayed then made his way to New York, where he began the clinical side of his program to become a clinician-scientist. He figured out how to navigate the emergency room where he worked, but often felt at odds with a system that perpetuated the disparities he wanted to work toward ending. 

His breaking point was watching the treatment of Martha, as he refers to her in his memoir, who had slipped and hit her head in a subway station. His colleagues had not ordered a CT scan, which should have been the first step in assessing the unhoused woman, and were preparing to discharge her. He spent two weeks caring for Martha, learning that she was also HIV positive and a person with alcoholism and diabetes who had been in and out of the medical system, and arranging for her to go to a rehabilitation facility. 

Instead, she went to live with her daughter. Several weeks later, as El-Sayed was boarding a subway, he found Martha sleeping there. Feeling that he, and the medical system, had failed her, he pulled his residency application that day.

“Practicing medicine wasn’t the path to solving the problems I cared about, as scared as I was to admit it after so many years of training,” he wrote.

As a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, El-Sayed focused his academic work largely on health disparities, with an emphasis on maternal mortality. He also studied the health of Arab Americans.

One paper that found Arab mothers had better birth outcomes when the father was also Arab was labeled as “racist” by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. “Scary stuff,” he wrote on X. That paper had not received much attention from the scientific community before that criticism, but El-Sayed’s work on Arab Americans was seen by some as pioneering. 

“I think he brought this population into the health disparities literature in a way that many folks before him had trouble doing,” said Nadia Abuelezam, an epidemiologist at Michigan State University who has worked with El-Sayed. Before working with him, doing research on Arab populations had been “very discouraged at my institution because there wasn’t a lot of funding for it and folks didn’t see it as a priority population.”

In a 2011 study, El-Sayed, working with Galea, found that marriage was not as protective against poor birth outcomes as many had thought. Galea said the study illustrated El-Sayed’s research approach: “A searching mind, one that is not willing to accept that things are static, and that we should be always thinking about our world and how it may be shifting.” 

Katherine Keyes, a former Columbia colleague who published several papers with El-Sayed on infant mortality and on the public health impacts of incarceration, agreed. “He thought of the idea, he located the data, he analyzed the data, he brought together experts who knew how to interpret the data,” she said. “Every step of the way was Abdul creating something out of nothing, some knowledge that didn’t exist before.”

Lofty ideas and political realities

To those close to him at Columbia, it was obvious El-Sayed was destined for bigger things. Some wondered whether he would lead a university or school of public health. The answer came a little over a year after he became a professor there. He was tapped by the mayor of Detroit for a homecoming of sorts, leading the Detroit Health Department. 

To his colleagues, it seemed like an obvious transition. El-Sayed was frequently frustrated at the slow speed by which academia can make a difference in people’s lives. Academics “are much more ready to study than to act as a rule, and that’s been true for generations. I think Abdul was uncomfortable with that,” said Steven Mooney, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who previously worked with El-Sayed. 

In taking the job, El-Sayed was facing an uphill battle. In what was the poorest major city in America, he was tasked with rebuilding the health agency after a prior administration had privatized it. He had lofty ideas: He launched a program to provide up to 5,000 children with free eyeglasses, increased testing for lead in water following the water crisis in nearby Flint, and launched an initiative to help residents pay off their medical debt, which has paid off over $95 million in debt, according to a local government dashboard. (El-Sayed has claimed on the campaign trail it has paid for $700 million). 

But the progress he was able to make didn’t feel like enough. Mooney recalls El-Sayed’s dissatisfaction with a project studying the potential impact of building demolitions on blood lead levels of children living nearby. It was a difficult problem. “We couldn’t say the demolitions weren’t a problem for kids, but we couldn’t say they were either,” Mooney said “You could feel him being disappointed in that result.” The data were not compelling enough to spur action. 

That frustration grew with the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

“So many of the programs that we had instituted were funded, directly or indirectly, by federal grant programs,” El-Sayed wrote in his memoir. “Those programs would likely face cuts or consolidations that would likely hurt the poor Black communities like Detroit that Trump would characterize as ‘American carnage’ in his inauguration.” 

A few months later, he submitted his resignation and launched a campaign for governor. 

“As an appointed public official,” El-Sayed told STAT, “you sit behind an elected politician who gets to set that frame of the debate. I think it’s just really important, as a scientist and public health leader, to be able to engage in the conversation about what that public mandate ought to be, about where public health ought to go.”

He said he hopes to embolden public health leaders to “pick broad, righteous fights” with private corporations that have been “hurting people.” The hesitation to do so, he believes, has harmed trust in the field.

During the Covid pandemic, he recalled, there was a “gentleman who was like, ‘Look, man, I’m going to take this vaccine. I get it, but you’re asking me to take a vaccine that didn’t exist a year ago for a disease that didn’t exist a year ago, but … I can’t afford my insulin, which is a medication that’s existed for 100 years for a disease I had my whole life.’

“We’re not standing up to the paywall that sits in front of a lot of the incredible things that science can produce for people,” he said.

‘Carefully analyzed the health care system’

El-Sayed garnered national attention as the possible first Muslim governor in the U.S., but lost in a primary to Gretchen Whitmer. He would remain a fixture on the national stage. 

While campaigning, El-Sayed had appeared on the popular, left-leaning podcast, “Pod Save America.” Believing there were few forums left for discussion of public health, El-Sayed flew out to Los Angeles and pitched the same network on the idea of a public health-focused podcast. He did 10 episodes about what he saw as the most pressing issues. 

Plans for what was to be a limited series changed as news of a novel coronavirus spread across the globe. El-Sayed was asked to do a biweekly show. He also campaigned with Sanders, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president.

He has incorporated Sanders’ Medicare for All initiative as one of the policy pillars of his Senate campaign. The proposal remains an uphill battle. But the public may be increasingly receptive to the idea: Support is at its highest since Sanders introduced it in 2016, according to a recent KFF poll. Two-thirds of respondents said they back a national health plan, with support higher among Democrats and independents. 

That figure is likely the result of growing concerns about the affordability of health care, said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “I would not interpret our poll as some indication that the public is knowledgeable about Medicare for All,” he said. The poll also found that support dropped when people were told Medicare for All would eliminate private health insurance, lead to delays in treatments, and require higher taxes. 

Joel Zinberg, director of the public health and American well-being initiative at Paragon Health Institute, a free market health policy think tank, and a critic of the proposal, said El-Sayed “relies very heavily on the idea that there’s going to be these tremendous administrative savings, you’re getting rid of complexity, whereas in fact, that’s sort of an illusion.” 

Allies of El-Sayed, however, hope that as someone who has written a book on Medicare for All and has seen many sides of the health care system, El-Sayed can legitimize the discussion around the proposal.

“A common critique of Medicare for All folks is that it’s just a slogan. It’s not serious, not rigorous on the policy. For Abdul that’s certainly not the case,” said Hayden Rooke-Ley, a friend of El-Sayed’s and a professor of health services policy and practice at Brown University.

“He’s somebody who has carefully analyzed the health care system, and asked what is the most efficient, just, and democratically accountable way to finance it and insure people,” he said. “And he’s concluded, I think correctly, that it would be to expand Medicare to everybody.”