Vic / Sarah

Vicky Wells speaking at Class Day, June 11, 1975.

Strumming in her Lowell House suite, 1973.

Candidate Vic Wulsin campaigning with candidate Barrack Obama in Portsmouth, OH, 2008.

Vic at a Cincinnati protest, February 2025.

Sarah as a sophomore.

Sarah with R75 classmates Joy Horowitz and Patty Marx.

Vic Wulsin (aka Victoria Wells) has devoted her life to creating and championing public health programs, in the States and abroad.  Now her work is under assault.

Some of us are retiring.  Not Vic Wulsin.  But she is “reeling.”  An epidemiologist and public health physician, Vic spent a decade at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  She was involved in the development, more than 20 years ago, of a program based in Kenya to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa.  Her unstinting dedication has been “to something that’s unpopular in American culture, namely prevention.”

And now, with the change of administrations—and in political philosophies—she is witnessing essential programs slashed; proven treatments for prevention completely dismissed.  It can feel as if a lifetime’s work is unraveling before your eyes.

Most of us would pack it in.  Again, not Vic Wulsin.  She ran for Congress in the Second District of Ohio three times; she knows what it’s like to do battle in the political arena.  And she doesn’t give up.

She tells Sarah Crichton in this timely episode of PasstheMic75 that she’s wrestling with sadness, watching the “rolling back of these advances we’ve made.”  Nevertheless, she persists:  “I have a lot of brain and energy left to make a difference.”