Welcoming Boost Oregon’s New Medical Director: An Interview with Ryan Hassan, M.D.

Ryan Hassan, M.D. is Boost Oregon's medical director and pediatrician working at Oregon Pediatrics in Happy Valley. He attended Paul L. Foster School of Medicine in El Paso, Texas, where he completed his medical and public health degrees in 2014. He completed his pediatric residency in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2017, and moved to Oregon.

Why did you begin volunteering with Boost Oregon?

I became a pediatrician because I want to help families keep their young children healthy, and minimize their risk for serious health complications as they get older. Vaccines are one of the most effective ways that we have to protect children from unnecessary health complications and medical interventions, but, unfortunately, they are also among the most maligned and misunderstood medicines, despite being far safer than most of the things that we expose our children to on a daily basis. Parents are often bombarded by vaccine misinformation, and don’t have the time or training to sift through the mess of noise and make informed decisions about vaccines, and medical providers often don’t have the time or training to help them do so during a typical office visit. When I learned about the work Boost was doing to train medical providers to have effective, non-judgmental conversations with their patients, and to provide free workshops for parents who wanted to learn more about their children’s vaccines in a safe, comfortable environment, I knew that this was work I needed to be a part of.

What is your new title at Boost Oregon and what do your job duties entail?

I am the first Medical Director of Boost Oregon. My job is to oversee the education that Boost provides for healthcare professionals and the public, to ensure the information we share remains accurate, relevant, and up to date. We are currently working on a project to train twenty new medical providers to deliver Boost Workshops in their own communities for patients with questions about the COVID-19 vaccine. Our goal is to ensure that these providers are equipped with the information, tools, and confidence they need to translate their knowledge of vaccines for their patients on a broader scale.

What do you value most about the work you do at Boost Oregon?

I appreciate having the opportunity to connect with people who want to learn more about vaccines and help them make informed decisions about their healthcare. I also like helping people learn to recognize their own cognitive biases and the ways that our brains fool us into making irrational decisions. Most of all, I am happy to know that my work is helping to keep people from getting sick from vaccine-preventable diseases.

What are you most excited to do as a member of Boost Oregon’s staff?

I am excited to come up with new and interesting ways to talk about vaccine science, so that everyone can enjoy learning about vaccines, and feel comfortable talking about them. Vaccines have saved more lives than all of the lives lost in every war of the 20th century combined. I think it’s important that everyone has a basic understanding of how they work, and how we know that they are safe and effective. I am hopeful that one day Boost’s approach will be adopted across the country to help people make informed vaccine decisions for themselves.

Please describe your career as a pediatrician. How long have you been working? What do you enjoy most about your job? What is most challenging? 

I began working as a pediatrician in private practice in the fall of 2017. At the clinic where I work, I see children for routine well child visits, where we talk about child development and healthy lifestyle choices, screen for preventable medical conditions, and, of course, provide routine vaccinations to prevent unnecessary infections.

My favorite part of my job as a pediatrician is getting to talk with my patients about their interests and goals, and watching them learn and grow over the years. I have now had many patients who have graduated high school and gone on to college or started careers of their own, and children who I saw when they were born in the hospital who are now getting ready to start kindergarten. I enjoy giving new books to my youngest patients through the Reach Out and Read Program, and reading together with them, or, as they get older, letting them read their new books to me. This is such a fun way to assess how a child’s language and literacy skills are developing, and also helps children feel more competent and confident of their own abilities.

I also enjoy hearing about the things that my patients and their families are doing together for fun. I have found that most parents are already doing the most important thing to keep their children healthy, which is to love them and spend time having fun with them. I try to focus on the things that parents are doing well, and encourage them to keep up the good work!

The most challenging part of my job is having to work within the confines of our woefully inadequate healthcare system. I see far too many children who have inadequate housing, or access to food, or who cannot get the accommodations they need to help them thrive in school, or who desperately need psychological support and cannot get it. I also know there are many children I cannot see enough, or at all; because they don’t even have adequate access to routine medical care. Some of the children who make me the most sad are those who just want to spend more time with their parents, but can’t because their parents have to work long hours and sometimes multiple jobs just to make ends meet. On top of all of this, the families I care for have to deal with the constant onslaught of parenting “advice” that comes with raising a child in the modern world, which too often is just unhelpful criticism and judgement, and is more frequently complete bunk than evidence-based guidance. On top of bogus stories about “the dangers of vaccines”, which are always either exaggerated or completely fabricated, parents face judgement for the way they put their babies to sleep, the way they feed them, the way they play with them, or the way they treat them when they’re sick. My goal when I speak with a parent is to provide accurate, evidence-based answers to their questions, so they feel comfortable providing their children with the care that’s best for them.

What is the most important information you want people to know about (COVID-19) vaccines?

Vaccines are among the most well-studied, most effective, and safest medical interventions we have, and COVID vaccines are no exception. We have now administered the COVID vaccine to over 4.7 billion people around the world, which is over 60% of the global population. We have clear data showing that the vaccines provide excellent protection against serious complications from COVID-19 infection, including infections caused by the recent delta and omicron variants of the virus. For people of all ages, those who have been vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19 are the least likely to get sick, the least likely to be hospitalized, and the least likely to die. In November in the US, unvaccinated people over age 18 had 13 times the risk of testing positive for COVID, and 68 times the risk of dying, compared to those who had been vaccinated and boosted. Common side effects from the vaccine are mild. Serious side effects are extremely rare, and very treatable, unlike many complications from COVID.

Getting yourself and your family fully vaccinated is the best way to protect not only yourselves, but also your friends and loved ones, and the people in your community who are at higher risk from the disease. Everyone owes it to themselves and their loved ones to get their vaccine questions answered by a reliable medical professional, and then get their vaccine.