Dr. Samir Witta

“I come to this as a scientist. I hold a Ph.D., did my doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, and have published thirteen peer-reviewed papers in journals including Nature Medicine, PNAS, and Cancer Research. I ran phase I trials. I know what evidence is, and I know what it isn’t.

Three mechanisms.

Restore Congress’s own scientific capacity. The Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress independent technical analysis until it was defunded in 1995. Since then members have relied on industry-funded briefings for technical questions. Congress cannot legislate on medicine, energy, or data infrastructure using material written by the parties being regulated.

A standing advisory group for my office — working Colorado researchers in medicine, energy, and water, convened regularly rather than summoned after a bill is drafted. Their job would be to tell me I’m wrong before I vote.

Full disclosure of the funding behind any analysis I rely on — and here is why this matters to me personally.

I’ve lived the pipeline. Taxpayers fund discovery through NIH. Industry partners sign agreements giving them rights to the inventions. The institution receives a few thousand dollars. The resulting drug earns billions — paid again by taxpayers through Medicare and by patients through premiums. The same pattern runs through defense: inventions made at universities, licensed cheaply, sold back to the public at enormous cost.

The government holds march-in rights over patents from federally funded research and has never used them. That is a choice, and it is made by a Congress funded by both pharmaceutical and defense money.

I take neither. Science is a method, and the method only works if the people applying it have nothing to gain from the answer.”

“I’m a physician, not a farmer. But the method is the same — you don’t treat before you examine, and you listen to the people who know the system from inside it.

So the first thing I’d do is build the advisory relationships: Colorado State University, our land-grant institution, and the producers themselves. Not a listening tour before an election. A standing line of communication with people doing the work and the researchers studying it.

Three places where federal action actually matters.

Water. Allocation on the Colorado River is governed by an interstate compact with federal involvement, and the hydrology the compact was built on no longer exists. I’d push for the research and the infrastructure investment that lets producers do more with less — efficiency, measurement, soil health — rather than waiting for the allocation fight to resolve itself. The same applies to aquifer depletion on the eastern plains.

Input costs. Fertilizer prices track natural gas and import dependence, and the market is highly concentrated — a handful of firms set the price of what every farmer must buy. Concentration is a federal antitrust question, not a market inevitability. Tariffs on imported fertilizer are also set in Washington, and they land directly on Colorado producers.

Research. Agricultural science in this country is largely publicly funded and then privately captured — taxpayer-funded work at land-grant universities licensed cheaply to agribusiness, which sells it back to farmers. I’ve watched the identical pattern in medicine. If the public pays for the discovery, the public should see the benefit in the price.

I take no PAC money and no corporate money, including from agribusiness. That means when a producer tells me something and an input supplier tells me the opposite, I have no reason to prefer one answer.”

“Start with what we don’t measure. Operators are not generally required to disclose how much water and electricity a facility actually consumes, which means communities are asked to approve projects whose real cost nobody can state. That’s the first fix: mandatory, standardized reporting of water and power consumption, published.

Then the economics. A large facility shifts grid demand and water draw in a state that is already water-stressed. If those costs aren’t assigned to the operator, they’re socialized — they appear in everyone else’s utility bill and in the water available to agriculture downstream. So every approval should require honest long-term projections of impact on local electricity and water costs, and those projections should determine what the operator pays to offset them.

Why this has to be federal: operators shop jurisdictions. If Colorado sets real standards and the state next door doesn’t, the facility moves and we’ve gained nothing. A federal floor ends the race to the bottom. It also protects local officials — the sums involved are enormous, the pressure on a county commission is intense, and that is exactly the condition under which bad deals and worse get made. A national standard takes that pressure off people who shouldn’t have to carry it alone.

On privacy: the computation happening in these buildings is not neutral. I’d require transparency about government contracts for data analysis and surveillance, and I’d close the loophole that lets agencies purchase from data brokers what they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.

I’m not against this industry. It will build somewhere, and Colorado should compete for good jobs. But it should compete on being a good place to operate, not on being the cheapest place to externalize costs onto residents who never got a vote.”

“Measles is one of the most contagious diseases we know. It requires roughly 95% community immunity to stop transmission — a far higher threshold than most infections — and the two-dose vaccine is about 97% effective. When coverage drops a few points below that line, outbreaks follow. That isn’t ideology; it’s arithmetic, and we have known it for decades.

Here is the part I’d ask people to sit with, because it’s what I lived.

I’m an oncologist. My patients on chemotherapy are immunosuppressed. Many of them cannot be vaccinated at all — their immune systems can’t respond, and in some cases a live vaccine would endanger them. They are protected by exactly one thing: everybody else’s immunity. A child on chemotherapy in Aurora is not safe because of anything her parents chose. She’s safe because her neighbors vaccinated.

That’s what community immunity actually means, and it’s why this isn’t an individual decision in the way people describe it.

On policy: fund public health infrastructure properly rather than in emergency surges after an outbreak has begun. Sustain federal immunization access programs so cost is never the barrier. Invest in local health departments, which have been hollowed out for twenty years and are the ones doing contact tracing when this happens.

And on trust — I’d be careful here. I spent twenty-five years persuading frightened people to accept treatment. Not once did contempt work. Coverage rises through access, through clinicians people know, and through honest answers to real questions. It falls when public health talks down to people.

Finally, prevention is cheaper than everything else we do. Free care for pregnant women and everyone under 26 isn’t only a cost measure. It’s the most effective public health policy available to us, and it prevents expense for decades afterward.”

“The gap is method and math.

On method: most people can recite that vaccines work. Far fewer were taught how anyone knows that — what evidence is, how it accumulates, why uncertainty isn’t ignorance, and why a scientist changing position when data changes is the system working.

I saw what that costs. For twenty-five years I would tell a patient a treatment had a 40% response rate, and most could not interpret that number in a way that helped them decide. Not for lack of intelligence — nobody had taught them to reason about probability. The most consequential decision of their lives, made without the tools.

On math: the United States performs below the average of comparable countries, in a world now built entirely on mathematics. That is a national capability problem, not a school problem, and it will decide whether our children build the next economy or work for someone else’s.

And we are asking them to learn this while their attention is being fragmented by design — by products engineered to interrupt them. That is a federal question, because no parent and no teacher can solve it alone.

What I’d change in K-12: teach the method, not only conclusions. Teach probability explicitly and early. More time doing science and mathematics — ambiguous results, real arguments — and less memorizing other people’s answers.

Who pays for it: the Fortune 500 companies making billions in this district should be investing in the schools their future workforce sits in now. Not donations. Sustained investment in labs, equipment, instructors, and apprenticeships, in the communities where they operate.

Curriculum is set by states and districts, and I won’t claim authority I don’t have. What Congress controls is funding, teacher support, and whether the companies profiting here are asked to contribute to the children who live here.”