Michigan is ground zero for the twin public health crises wreaking havoc in the US. The state has had some of the most polluted air on Earth due to Canadian wildfire smoke last week while it also has the highest number of cyclosporiasis cases in the country.
These in-your-face (and sometimes in-your-gut) problems, says senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, help make a complex topic—the need to invest in public health infrastructure—extremely easy to talk about with voters. And he has unique qualifications to do so as a MD-PhD who’s served as the health officer for Detroit.
“Do you like eating lettuce? I do. I don’t like the idea because we DOGE’d our whole service that keeps the lettuce safe,” El-Sayed says, referring to how the Department of Government Efficiency downsized the federal lab that tests for cyclosporiasis last year. “Now, everybody’s trying to dodge the lettuce. And if you don’t, then you’re stuck on a toilet for the next five days. That sucks.”
El-Sayed is locked in a tight Democratic primary for Michigan’s open senatorial seat. He’s received support from big-name progressives: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied with him in Grand Rapids over the weekend, while Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed him on Monday. In her endorsement, Warren said El-Sayed was someone who would fight “the same billionaires and special interests that have rigged our economy against working people.” For El-Sayed, that includes addressing election spending.
“A lot of this, in the end, comes back to getting money out of politics,” he says. “A lot of these changes in regulations are about massive food companies being like, well, those regulations are too much. We can enforce them ourselves. I’m like, can you? How come you didn’t fix the poop lettuce?”
WIRED caught up with El-Sayed to chat about how he’d fix the public health problems facing his state and why we shouldn’t accept that “poop lettuce” is our new normal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
WIRED: How have the past few weeks been for you personally, with this one-two punch of public health crises?
Abdul El-Sayed: I don’t know what happened, but for four days I got taken out—I didn’t get tested, because I was on the campaign trail, but I think it was [cyclosporiasis]. If you can imagine campaigning, it was miserable. It was actually my wife who was like, you probably got this.
And then for the past week or so, we’ve been really worried about air quality. I try to stay active—I do a lot of biking—and I’ve been choosing to stay inside. You do more harm than good exercising outside with this kind of air quality.
You shouldn’t have to be dodging lettuce everywhere you go and then unknowingly getting the runs because you didn’t dodge the lettuce. Step back and ask yourself if any of this is normal.
You’ve had a lot of experience handling crises like these at the local and state level. What would you do in the Senate, especially given an administration that has been taking away funding and staff and the basic tools of public health, like peer-reviewed science and public data?
I’d love to be able to haul up leaders at the EPA, the CDC, and the FDA [to testify before Congress]. I want to investigate exactly how our food supply got compromised, how decisions were made at the CDC. Why are their counts so far behind? For the vast majority of people, cyclosporiasis is not a deadly outcome—but imagine what happens when the same infrastructure has to deal with something that really is. What are we going to do then?
There are certain things that you should take for granted: that you can eat food and stay generally healthy, or that you can breathe the air and go outside without that making you sick. You think about the great DOGEing of a lot of our public health infrastructure—while it’s impossible to connect one outcome to the next, if you cut the staff of the people who are supposed to be invested in keeping us healthy, don’t be surprised when, down the line, they’re not good at keeping us healthy. Now, we’re dealing with the consequences.
When DOGE was happening, it would have been really important to have had a public health senator, who could ask the hard questions about what they’re dismantling, and if they even know the broader functions of the things they’re dismantling.
Both the outbreak and the wildfire smoke seem to me to be very visceral symptoms of larger, really thorny issues—climate change, disinvestment in public health, modern corporatization of food systems—that are tough to get voters invested in solving. How do you talk to people about systemic issues like these?
The hard part about these problems is that they operate on very long time horizons. Too often the conversation is more about these petty, esoteric questions—about the competence of the public health infrastructure, or 2 degrees centigrade—rather than, hey, kids shouldn’t have asthma and you should stop putting pollution in the air.
People don’t want to be stuck on a toilet for the better part of the day, every day. That means we have to keep our food clean and track when this happens, so that if we do have something that’s a deadly disease next time, we have the public health infrastructure ready to go. We could get better, more reliable jobs if we actually just invested in renewable energy. If we were serious about the energy transition that we need to have, we can create a massive number of union jobs.
I’m glad you brought up renewable energy. Michigan is ground zero for anti-renewables sentiment: It has the highest level of anti-solar and anti-wind ordinances in the country. How do you meet voters where they are on issues like these, where they might be resistant to some of the things that we need to do to address systemic problems?
At the end of the day, the big challenge that people across my state are experiencing is not climate change writ large. It’s “I can’t afford to pay my rent. I’m really worried about whether or not I’ll ever have a home. I’m really worried about what happens if I see a doctor, and that damn utility company keeps raising my rates, and now they’re trying to charge me extra money just to pay my bills.”
It behooves us to be talking about those problems, because those are the problems everyday people are facing. When you take those problems and build them out, you start to realize that they are part and parcel of a whole bigger set of problems that are really important for everyday people’s lives, but just aren’t the imminent problems that everybody is facing today. I think it’s important for us to be constantly talking about the challenges people face, because those are the real things people want us to solve, but also connecting them to the bigger picture. We can have these conversations, but we’ve got to make sure people understand the full burden of the issue.
If you’re elected, you’ll be entering a Congress that seems to get more and more dysfunctional each year. Some Republicans are now recommending sanctioning Canada over the wildfire smoke.
[Laughs] It’s so unserious. We’ve got to be able to be like, what you’re saying is laughably ridiculous. The problem with the Democrats is that we’re so afraid of our own shadow, we actually don’t make any arguments.
I’m wondering if you have any hope of working across the aisle on literally anything, or having productive conversations with politicians across the aisle.
There’s a more important conversation between all of us and the people who elect us. I’ve been traveling up and down my state talking to folks who don’t always think like me on the issues, and both learning how they’re thinking about things, and how we solve their problems.
I think I can build some really good bipartisan relationships with folks who voted on the other side. Do you really want to be breathing this stuff right now? Do you really want to be dodging lettuce? I don’t think anyone wants to be dodging lettuce. Seems to be a pretty bipartisan position.
