A Q&A with State Rep. Tarik Khan

State Rep. Tarik Khan, a registered nurse and nurse practitioner with a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing, spoke with City & State to offer his thoughts on the state of public health in Pennsylvania and the U.S., while also offering input on how lawmakers can prepare for future public health crises.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

How has your background in nursing informed your work as a legislator?It was really the pandemic where my nursing skills had to cross over into politics. I was engaging lawmakers and letting them know what was going on. Even just being from the research point of view, to be able to read and know what is happening on the scientific level, and then explaining that to people on a human level was super important. I used to visit these forums – I felt like it was every night … I was having conversations, and there would be elected officials who were getting information from me, a healthcare provider. It really was the intersection between politics and health care. 

As a legislator … I worked on getting families better access to vaccinations. I worked on that bill with (former state Rep.) Donna Bullock, and we signed that into law. The Alzheimer’s and dementia infrastructure bill – I worked with state Rep. Maureen Madden, the Department of Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. We got that signed into law. These were things that I had seen in my practice that I was saying that I was going to address.

What are the key lessons learned from the pandemic?

I think what COVID showed is that you have to be prepared. You have to invest in the infrastructure. Clearly, there was no infrastructure. 

Am I optimistic about moving forward? Are we prepared? We’re not. I mean, we saw what happened with the Trump administration back in 2018 when Donald Trump fired the pandemic response team in 2018, and we had the pandemic upon us. We basically had no infrastructure. There was no team to call because he had fired them already. What we see happening now is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are firing everybody. It’s shoot first and aim second. They are taking a flamethrower to all of our government services. … My feeling is that we are not prepared for a future pandemic. The lesson of investing in infrastructure is not something that they care about because they’re making massive layoffs in each department. … If you are having an exodus of your staff, the last thing you can do is focus on your future. 

And I think the pandemic would have been a lot better if we had nurses at the table. 

How do you get people to trust public health leaders?

I think working to build back trust from the public is important – it’s something that I try to do as an elected official, where I actually knock on a lot of doors and I talk to people. I try to be accessible and communicate as often as possible with people. Having that relationship with people makes it easier when you present information to them. 

I think we have to do a way better job on messaging and letting people know about the good work that we’re doing. That’s a role that we can do as elected officials. I’m not calling anyone out specifically – we are doing a poor job letting people know what we’re standing for. If you know the things that people voted on in this election, Democrats would have said those were our issues, but people voted against Democrats. 

We have to take a really good look at that and say, “Sure, there may have been some things that were unique to 2024, but also, it really should be a wake-up call.” The fact that we’re even having this discussion where people are doubting the veracity of COVID, the veracity of a vaccine that’s proven. We are just doing a crappy job messaging what we're doing, and that's a problem. That should be part of the job.