by Neha Pathak, Yale Climate Connections
October 23, 2026
When wildfire smoke drifts over a city or a heat wave blankets a community, doctors and nurses see the results firsthand. Asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, and heat-related illnesses surge.
Dr. Cynthia Mahoney, a retired California internist and nephrologist, helps lead Climate Health • Civic Health, an all-volunteer alliance of health professionals and organizations, alongside colleagues Margie Chen and Karina Maher.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Mahoney about how climate change affects our health, why data centers have galvanized action, and what readers can do leading into Election Day.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: How does climate change affect people’s health?
Dr. Cynthia Mahoney: Climate disruption and fossil fuel pollution impact our health from cradle to grave, and it’s going to get much worse unless we change course now.
Think of a worker who collapses in 105-degree heat and ends up in the hospital. That’s going to get worse. That’s climate change.
What’s so unique about climate change is that it’s going to impact all of us. It puts us all in this together.
YCC: You practiced in intensive care units. Does that shape how you see this problem?
Mahoney: I was trained as a nephrologist and practiced a lot in ICUs. What I prided myself on was not just treating what I saw in front of me, but asking, “Where is this patient going? How do I intervene now to keep them from deteriorating?”
This is an ICU moment. The health of the people on Earth needs ICU-level care. We see where this is heading, and we need to intervene.
YCC: Why do you want people to vote?
Mahoney: Democracy is the way we change direction.
A lot of young people think, “Look what I’ve lived through. Voting hasn’t helped me. Why should I bother?” Some people are cynical: The politicians are just in it for the money. There may be some truth to part of that. But that is furthering the goals of the people who are trying to corruptly extract our health from us. If voting wasn’t important, they wouldn’t be trying that hard to suppress it.
YCC: When it comes to climate and health, what do you look for in candidates?
Mahoney: First of all, do they have a climate position? We’re seeing a lot that don’t. Are they dealing with the reality that we have to transition away from fossil fuels? Increasing clean energy isn’t enough. It has to be paired with cutting fossil fuels. And if they’re promoting data centers without community input, that says they don’t really care about your concerns or your health.
YCC: Data centers have become a flashpoint in many communities. Why do you think that is?
Mahoney: For so many years, climate change was the CO2 rising on a monitor. We couldn’t see it, and we couldn’t feel it, so it was an abstraction. CO2 was distant, and fossil fuel corporations lied about it. They denied, they delayed, they greenwashed. We had blinders put over our eyes.
With data centers, they can’t put blinders on it. You can see it going up. It’s noisy. You smell the diesel. You hear the diesel generators. You see and hear your patients coughing and with headaches. It’s right in your community. That has woken people up.
YCC: What does the data center fight have to do with voting?
Mahoney: It’s so tangible how democracy is being disrupted. People’s say over what happens in their community is being squelched, suppressed, and it makes people angry, and rightfully so. They know some politicians are making backroom deals. If you’re not told about something until it’s too late for you to intervene, is that corruption? I think so.
But there’s been a lot of success pushing back. If we band together as a community and demand better, we can achieve something. Data centers are a model of the harms of unfettered corporations and fossil fuels. At the same time, they’re a model of the power we as citizens have to protect our health and our communities.
YCC: Why do you want health professionals to look beyond the exam room and into the voting booth?
Mahoney: The thing that really opened my eyes was the social determinants of health. I worked so hard to take really good care of my patients. Then I learned that health outcomes are dominated more by the social determinants than anything I could offer in my office. Studies came out showing that your ZIP code means more to your health than your genetics. If we only focus in the office, we can’t possibly help address those things.
When it comes to climate and pollution and their impact on our health, these are policy decisions. This is where collective action comes in. We don’t have to solve the problem, but we have to help our patients identify it and understand why voting is a prescription for health.
YCC: You say voting is a health intervention. What do you mean?
Mahoney: The social determinants are all dependent on public policy. Public policy is developed in the context of our democracy, which gives voice to citizens through our vote and civic participation. That makes voting itself a health intervention, and a healthy democracy is a precondition for healthy people. Voting is medicine.
YCC: How do clinicians fit climate and voting into an ordinary visit?
Mahoney: There’s a pediatrician we work with who says she can always connect climate with voting with every patient. If you’re talking to the parents of a newborn and saying you’ve got to use a car seat, what’s the risk to that child of not using a car seat versus the risk to the baby from not getting a handle on climate change?
Just like getting a car seat, you can do something right now about climate change. You can be an informed voter for health.
YCC: Is it risky for doctors and nurses to talk about elections?
Mahoney: Vote ER [a group dedicated to bringing civic engagement into healthcare settings] has years of evidence. Most patients actually appreciate it, and the clinicians who do it feel better. Making the connection between climate and health, health and your vote, is not partisan. We don’t tell people how to vote. We help them recognize that policy is how we improve the conditions for health, and they have the power to change that through their vote. If we use science-based evidence combined with our care, our trusted voice is our superpower.
YCC: Why did you create the Meeting the Moment tool kit, and how do you hope health professionals will get involved before the midterms?
Mahoney: We had tool kits for each of the earlier No Kings Protests to alert people to the threat to democracy, and using our trusted voices to stand up and speak out. It’s hard to know where to get started, so we offer a buffet, essentially, of activities.
We have a unique opportunity to connect with patients and communities who trust us and recognize, for the most part, that we’re not speaking to benefit ourselves. Nobody else has that.
YCC: The tool kit calls civic engagement “the new black bag.” What does that mean?
Mahoney: The black bag was what you took out of the clinic when you were making your home visit. Civic participation, both for ourselves and our patients, is the new black bag: We have to bring this home to our patients. And the most powerful medicine inside that black bag is voting. We must prescribe informed voting if we want to change the health trajectory.
YCC: And readers who aren’t health professionals?
Mahoney: Start with being an informed voter, with eyes open, understanding the connections. Vote in these elections up and down the ballot. It’s patients and communities who have the power of their vote, and they need to not be dissuaded by apathy or cynicism. Election season has already started. You can find nonpartisan information for your location at vote.org.
YCC: What gives you hope?
Mahoney: I used to confuse hope with optimism. Now I understand hope not as a feeling, but as a muscle that you exercise. What builds hope is seeing this alliance grow. More and more people in the health community understand the climate risk and how it ties into a strong democracy. Seeing that understanding bloom is building hope.
Voting resources
- Are you ready to vote? Check your state’s registration and early voting dates on Vote.org.
- The Election Earth Challenge, a nonpartisan guide from ecoAmerica, will help you prepare.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/10/voting-is-medicine-these-health-professionals-want-you-to-vote-in-the-midterms/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://yaleclimateconnections.org”>Yale Climate Connections</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/yaleclimateconnections.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ycc-favicon.png?resize=100%2C100&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://yaleclimateconnections.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=143864&ga4=1401ERFF5Q” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/10/voting-is-medicine-these-health-professionals-want-you-to-vote-in-the-midterms/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/yaleclimateconnections.org/p.js”></script>
