Dr. Ali Khan knelt down outside a Karachi doorway and extended his hand. The young girl who, moments earlier, had just received the polio vaccine extended her hand and a skeptical look toward the smiling doctor in a red hat emblazoned with a white N.

“On the front lines in Karachi, meeting a superstar who just got her polio protection. Every drop counts!” Khan wrote in an October social media post accompanying the photo. The dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was in Pakistan to help with the country’s push to eradicate polio.

The context — being called to the other side of the globe by a preventable disease while a different preventable disease, measles, made a resurgence in his home country — was not lost on Khan, one of the nation’s leading experts in tracking and combating the spread of emerging infectious diseases. It might be considered ironic were the stakes not so immense.

“We’ve never had as many cases in the last 25 years as we’ve had this year,” Khan said in his Omaha office in October. “We’ve had multiple outbreaks across the United States this year. … And we’ve had three deaths. That’s just unconscionable for what is a vaccine-preventable disease.”

It’s the kind of suffering that the Brooklyn native from a working-class family has worked his entire adult life to end.

Khan, who arrived in Nebraska to run the college in 2014, became a highly visible advocate for public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nebraska and beyond. He has remained an unflinching and outspoken proponent of science-based approaches to COVID and other threats to public health even as public support and trust has waned.

“When you think about the kind of difficult environment that we’re in, in terms of misinformation and disinformation, having someone like him who is very consistently speaking strongly on science is a huge service to the community and to the country,” said Douglas County Health Director Lindsay Huse.

That’s not to say Khan doesn’t see room for improvement in his field. He has called for greater transparency and more dialogue to help repair trust with an increasingly skeptical public. Despite routinely offering critiques on his X account, Khan doesn’t shy away from applauding President Donald Trump’s administration when it takes steps he thinks will improve public health, such as when it struck a deal to lower the cost of weight-loss drugs.

But the past year has brought more challenges than wins, especially for his former employer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polling has found that trust in those institutions has fallen.

Along with restoring evidence-based measures, the doctor believes that the cure for the current climate lies in what the photo taken in Karachi illustrated: connection.

Khan keeps an old yellow sticky note taped to the computer monitor in his UNMC office.

The words that he scrawled years ago have faded from red to brown. But their message is clear to him and evident to people who know his work as an academic, a globe-trotting disease detective and an outspoken advocate for equitable public health practice that is based on science, not on politics.

The sticky note reads: “Integrity. Disruption. Health creation.”

Khan has kept an iteration of that note on his computer for more than 20 years. It helps guide his work leading the College of Public Health.

“I don’t like the status quo,” Khan said. “So I like to disrupt, not for the sake of disrupting, but disrupting for the sake of making it better, and being creative.”

And integrity?

“I hold that true and dear to my heart, because at the end of the day, I have to have integrity. Because otherwise, why would you ever trust anything I say to you?”

The other watchwords, health creation, make up his life’s mission — a mission born from his childhood love of reading.

Khan grew up in a blue-collar family in Brooklyn, New York. His father worked as a plumber and electrician. Khan became the first in his family to get a high school education.

“I became an avid reader in middle school,” he said. “I read everything and anything, the classics, romances, you name it, I read it.”

He consumed such confections as the Victorian romances of Barbara Cartland and the Western frontier adventure novels of Louis L’Amour. Then he read about the 19th century French scientist who invented pasteurization, developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies and made life-saving discoveries that remain foundational to modern microbiology and immunology.

“I fell in love with medicine probably when I was 14 or 15 years old and read a book about Louis Pasteur,” Khan said. “I wanted to be like Louis Pasteur one day. And so I became laser focused.”

Pursuing that passion, he zipped through Brooklyn College, down the street from his family home, in three years. He went a little farther down the street to earn a medical degree from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.

“And then I realized I was allowed to leave Brooklyn,” he said.

Despite his parents’ pleas to continue his studies closer to home, Khan did his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Michigan.

“I knew what I wanted to do and then, fortunately, that got derailed by a wonderful mentor, Bob Gaines, during my residency,” he said.

Gaines told Khan that he had set up an infectious disease residency for him in Boston, but suggested that he first go to the CDC in Atlanta.

“I asked him, how do you spell that?” Khan said. “And he said, ‘Don’t embarrass me.’”

Khan took the advice. He applied for a two-year CDC disease detective program called the Epidemic Intelligence Service. It was created in the 1950s to rapidly deploy men and women into the field to detect if an infectious disease had been delivered by biological warfare. The program provides hands-on post-graduate training in epidemiology.

Epidemic Intelligence Service officers have worked on such problems as polio, lead poisoning, birth defects, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and natural disasters.

His first real field assignment took him to Hawaii to investigate a diarrhea outbreak on a cruise ship. After being humbled by seasickness and his lack of knowledge about the Norwalk virus, Khan doggedly traced the likely origin of the spread to dirty hands sharing a scoop in the ship’s open ice bin. The solution: He got the cruise ship to switch to a machine that drops ice in a bucket.

“It was a wonderful, brilliant two years,” Khan said. “I found my tribe during those two years, the ethos of public health, the selflessness, the focus on social justice.”

He was hooked. Khan’s two-year stint grew into 23 years at the CDC, mainly all about infectious diseases. He developed an expertise in global health response and became chief of the CDC’s Special Pathogens Unit.

His work took Khan to Alaska for an influenza outbreak, the Four Corners of the southwestern U.S. for a deadly hantavirus outbreak, slaughterhouses in the United Arab Emirates for a life-threatening hemorrhagic fever spreading among guest workers from Asia and to Washington, D.C., in 2001 for an anthrax attack on Capitol Hill

In 1995, Khan joined a multi-agency international team including the World Health Organization that was sent to Zaire to investigate and try to stem a bloody fever that turned out to be caused by the Ebola virus. It killed hundreds of people, many of them health care workers.

Khan eventually traced the outbreak to “patient zero,” the first victim. The teams identified how the virus was being transmitted. They employed such measures as quarantines, contact tracing, hygiene procedures among health care workers and persuading people to change their ritual cleansing and burial preparation practices by family members of the deceased.

“Through all this, we had to tackle the community’s magical thinking,” Khan wrote in his 2016 book “The Next Pandemic.”

“The original outbreak in the hospital was thought to have been a curse by somebody who had not been invited to share a meal with his colleagues at work.”

It wasn’t the last time Khan would encounter magical thinking.

Dr. Khan’s assessment was measured but blunt.

“We are … an exceptional failure in the number of deaths we continue to allow in the United States everyday.”

It was October of 2020, and he had been called to speak before the Omaha City Council as it wrestled with whether to extend a mask mandate. By that point, Khan had emerged as a vocal leader in Nebraska’s response to the pandemic.

On some level, he was echoing points he had made in his book four years earlier. An effective response, he wrote, requires “strong leadership, data transparency, and a willingness to spend time and money on robust public health and healthcare systems, and community engagement.

“The countries that have followed these principles have survived with limited harm,” he wrote. “The ones that have replaced them with hope and magical thinking have suffered.”

It didn’t take long for “magical thinking” to start spreading: claims that COVID was less deadly than the flu or that masks were a conspiracy to take away people’s rights. As Khan presented to the City Council, some members of the public wore incredulous and aggrieved expressions. One woman sporting a hat saying “LEGALIZE FREEDOM” appeared to mouth “liar” as Khan reviewed death statistics.

The doctor was undeterred. And he remains so, even amid a raft of challenges now five years later.

Childhood vaccination rates in the U.S. declined during the 2024-25 school year, according to the CDC. That includes the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which had a rate of 92.5% — below the 95% threshold needed to prevent transmission of the measles virus, which was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

The U.S. saw 2,144 measles cases in 2025, a dramatic spike from the less than 300 recorded in 2024, according to the CDC. Of the cases in 2025, 93% of people were unvaccinated.

Nebraska has already recorded four cases in 2026, all of whom belonged to a single household in Platte County, according to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. The department noted that vaccines offer the best protection against measles.

Nationally, the CDC has been embroiled in turmoil for much of the past year. In August, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the director of the CDC, which coincided with resignations of several top officials who bemoaned the direction of the agency under Kennedy’s leadership. Kennedy later told senators that changes were needed because the CDC had failed at its job. “We are the sickest country in the world,” he said.

Since then, the agency has: changed its website to say the long-held conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism “is not an evidence-based claim”; stopped recommending people receive the COVID-19 vaccine; and reduced the number of vaccines recommended for every child.

Health officials across the U.S. slammed those moves, arguing they lacked scientific backing and would weaken public health. The Nebraska Infectious Diseases Society, an advocacy group consisting of experts in different fields, said the changes to child vaccination recommendations announced earlier this month could allow the return of preventable diseases.

“Rather than enhancing trust, this decision undermines the transparent, evidence-based process that has protected children for decades.”

Faith in the CDC and other federal health entities has declined, multiple polls have found. An Axios/Ipsos American Health Index poll conducted in October found 54% of respondents said they trusted the CDC, down from 66% in December 2024. The poll found a similar decline for the Food and Drug Administration.

Khan said problems are not limited to the federal government. He noted that in the past year, Louisiana health officials delayed warning the public about an outbreak of whooping cough, a vaccine-preventable disease.

“It’s just been disappointing that we have not had that strong political voice supporting public health,” Khan said. “If anything, we’ve seen a lot of undermining of public health, with multiple legislative bills across the U.S., and what looks like the humiliation of the CDC, once not just a premier U.S. health agency, but a premier global health agency.”

He said what has happened with the CDC in 2025 is a reminder to him that people in public health “need to work on transparency and humility to try to rebuild trust.”

“We need to make public health more visible within our communities,” he said. “Yes, during the pandemic, people realized what our public health authorities are and our relationship to vaccines and diseases. But I think we need to be more visible to let people know what we do for them every day.”

Public health “is about a lot more than just vaccines,” Khan says. It’s a point evident everyday in the College of Public Health.

His decision to come to Nebraska — a state he’d never been to — to lead the college in 2014 marked a major career change for the disease hunter turned bureaucrat.

He had spent more than two decades at the CDC, rising to the rank of assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service. In that role, he led the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, a biodefense program with a $1.5 billion budget that included the largest pharmacy in the world, the Strategic National Stockpile.

When a mentor suggested he consider academia, Khan decided to take the leap. He has continued to think and act globally even as he teaches classes at UNMC, leads the college and throws himself into the local community and state, where he’s known for his approachable demeanor and willingness to lend a hand.

Khan said the college has doubled its number of students in the past five years. They’re from 44 states and 36 countries now. According to UNMC, 43% of the college’s students are Nebraska residents.

“We bring the world to Nebraska and we take Nebraska to the world right here at the College of Public Health,” he said.

Huse, the Douglas County health director, called Khan a “huge asset” to Nebraska.

“We’re very lucky to have him,” she said. “He has been around the world. He has fought some of the biggest diseases. It’s just pretty impressive that we have him here.”

The college is working to improve public health across Nebraska. Khan pointed to an effort he co-leads called ALIGN Nebraska. It brings together major health systems, care organizations, insurers, nongovernmental organizations, the federal government and state and local health departments.

The group formed about five years ago to improve colorectal cancer screening rates. It has been successful, he said. They’re now pivoting to focus on improving maternal health and infant outcomes, specifically inequality, Khan said.

A Flatwater Free Press analysis of federal data found Nebraska had the fourth-highest infant mortality rate for babies born to Black moms in the country in 2019-2023.

“If you’re a Black baby born here in Nebraska, you’re about two to three times more likely to die than a white baby,” Khan said, “and that’s just unconscionable here in Nebraska.”

The college has continued to uphold its social justice foundation and mission to be inclusive of everyone in Nebraska — rural or urban, young or old, men or women, underrepresented in medicine or not, Khan said. That won’t change, he added.

“I’m willing to sacrifice being liked (and being employed) for doing the right thing for the people we serve and those I work for and with,” he said.

This story was done in collaboration with Omaha Magazine. This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/were-very-lucky-to-have-him-the-globetrot...