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In 2025, the AFT launched a series of town halls focused on providing timely, science-based health insights for AFT members and their communities. The series, “Vital Lessons: Health Chats with Dr. Vin Gupta,” covers a wide range of topics—including measles, perimenopause and menopause, autism, immunizations and back-to-school safety, and mental health—and is available at sharemylesson.com/vital-lessons.
For this special edition of Share My Lesson, we talked with Dr. Vin Gupta about what inspired the Vital Lessons series as well as his unique career path in medicine. A pulmonologist and a leading public health expert at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and communication, Gupta is the managing director of healthcare innovation at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, a major in the US Air Force Reserve serving in the Medical Corps, and a regular medical analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
–EDITORS
EDITORS: Will you share your path to becoming a doctor and why this career is important to you?
DR. VIN GUPTA: I’ve been heavily influenced by my mom, who was a neonatal intensive care doctor. I saw the impact she had on her patients, who were tiny, critically ill babies, as she exuded love, warmth, and empathy. It showed me from a very early age that there are few things in life as meaningful as being trusted to care for somebody else’s loved one.
I was also heavily shaped by September 11. My first day of college was literally September 11, 2001. I was at Princeton, about 40 minutes south of Lower Manhattan, so that day brought an emotional window into the possibilities and impact of medicine and a desire to one day join the armed forces in some capacity.
After my first two years of medical school, I was fortunate to have two seminal experiences in global health. I spent time in Uganda working to understand malaria burden. Then I spent a year working closely with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention to understand the high cancer burden in Shanghai. While learning what might be useful in the American context, my colleagues and I were also building bridges across countries that didn’t always see eye to eye. This was around the time that President Obama came into office, and the focus on soft power and diplomacy also became top of mind for me. By the time I graduated medical school, I knew I wanted to help improve global health as a clinician and communicate that focusing on shared health challenges makes for a safer world.
In 2011, I went to Seattle to begin a residency in internal medicine, and in March 2012, I joined the Air Force Reserves to serve in the Medical Corps, then completed officer training school and was formally commissioned in 2015. My military experience has been deeply impactful. I’ve seen the intersection of healthcare in our military and how helping other nations build better health systems furthers our national security. There’s a soft power element to global health that meets common goals, like pandemic preparedness and rooting out disease.
After my residency in internal medicine, I pursued a career in pulmonary critical care medicine and got a master’s in public administration focused on healthcare policy and communication skills. That decision turned out to be fateful in a really good way, as we’ve now seen for the last six years that lung health is public health. At the same time, I was in the throes of military service as an ICU reservist. I was part of a critical care air transport team tasked with safely evacuating and transporting critically ill soldiers from downrange back to the United States. I rose in the ranks, ultimately becoming a major, and led that team on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
This is how I have led my life: doing things that I found meaningful; following curiosities in global health, military medicine, and bedside communication; and trying to be the best doctor I could through all these trainings. Along the way, I was often asked to speak publicly on matters related to lung health, like climate change or vaping. Then COVID hit, and I kept being asked to speak. I wasn’t looking to be a TV doctor, but communicating what I hope is trusted health information to a large audience has now become an important part of my life.
EDITORS: Is that dedication to sharing information why you are giving so much of your time to Vital Lessons?
VIN: I think it’s more critical now than ever to engage in conversations with a diverse audience to understand people’s questions and try to distill down complexity in an accessible, non-judgmental, and non-condescending way. Also, it’s been revealed in recent years that the ways healthcare leaders have communicated with the public on health issues are not working. For example, posting something on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website and then thinking it’s going to diffuse down to the masses and people will trust it—that doesn’t work.
There’s a tension between the public wanting institutional credibility in some cases but rejecting it in others. The institutions providing the vaccine recommendations that are ignored by a lot of people are the same institutions that credential me to provide intensive care to a family’s loved one; they are the same institutions that credential a trauma surgeon to provide emergency surgery on somebody who was in a car accident. Yet while there’s a segment of society that says, “Whatever the CDC puts on the website, we’re going to revolt against it,” many of those same people want a credentialed, respected clinician to provide lifesaving care to them or their loved ones if they need it. Some people—even some with medical degrees behind their names—are taking advantage of this tension for their personal aggrandizement.
I want to move the needle forward, which does not happen unless you’re out there meeting and talking with people. Through Vital Lessons, I see an opportunity to move the needle forward with AFT members, who are a microcosm of America. Every day, the AFT’s 1.8 million members are doing vital frontline work in hospitals, schools, and other places across the country. So, partnering with the AFT to talk about issues that matter with real people who are doing the real work is a privilege.
EDITORS: How are you choosing the experts featured in the series?
VIN: I am not the nation’s top expert on any topic. It is important to me that this series be a platform to bring together the best healthcare leaders and thinkers because we don’t have the best, by a long shot, in the federal government right now. In fact, some of the leaders we have in healthcare at the federal level are among the worst; they are distorting it and harming public health and families.
In response, I’ve tried in my platforms—and now especially through Vital Lessons—to bring healthcare experts at the highest levels of leadership under the banners of both Republicans and Democrats to discuss apolitical issues that I think matter to all of us.
In March, we brought Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, the 2024 president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, to talk about measles. In April, we heard from President Trump’s first surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams—one of the nation’s foremost experts on youth mental health. For our May town hall, we talked with Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell and Dr. Kathleen Green, two leading African American women’s health experts, about perimenopause and menopause because Black women often do not receive the same level of healthcare as white women. In June, we had Dr. Mandy Cohen, President Biden’s former CDC director, talking about caring for ourselves. Then in July, we talked about autism and dispelled common myths with Dr. Peter Hotez, an internationally recognized expert in vaccine development, and Danielle Hall, a senior leader from the Autism Society of America. In August, we talked with Dr. Dave Chokshi, who was New York City’s commissioner of health during COVID, about back-to-school safety. September’s session was with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who served under Republican and Democratic presidential administrations in senior roles at the CDC, to talk about vaccines and childhood health. In November, we focused on protecting mental health and building community in sessions with Dr. Irwin Redlener, a nationally recognized expert on disaster preparedness, and Casey Pick, the director of law and policy at the Trevor Project. And I’m looking forward to upcoming discussions on creating inclusive communities for individuals with disabilities, and more.
What we’re trying to do with this series is bring union and healthcare leaders together to talk about public health and get people the science-based, trustworthy information they need. We haven’t been perfect, but we remain dedicated to the power of coming together in collaboration in this new world, and that is the spirit of Vital Lessons.
[Photo courtesy of Vin Gupta]