President Joe Biden March 17 announced the appointment of Dr. Ashish Jha to serve as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, taking the lead on the administration’s approach to the pandemic.
Jha, the Dean of Public Health at Brown University, replaces outgoing Covid czar Jeffrey Zients, and will take up the position April 5. He will take time off from Brown to take up his new role at the White House.
Jha has been a familiar face during the pandemic, which is entering its third year, with more than 79 million infections in the U.S. and 967,000 deaths. “Dr. Jha is one of the leading public health experts in America, and a well-known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence,” said Biden in a statement announcing the appointment.
“As we enter a new moment in the pandemic — executing on my National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan and managing the ongoing risks from COVID — Dr. Jha is the perfect person for the job,” he said.
Jha said in a statement: “President Biden and his Administration continue to provide the American people what’s needed to get beyond this pandemic and move our nation forward safely, back to work, and back to school.”
“I am honored by the President’s invitation to lead this important work and meet the challenges ahead. To the American people, I promise I will be straightforward and clear in sharing what we know, in explaining what we don’t know and how we will learn more, and what the future will ask of all of us,” he said.
Public health expert Dr. Nirav Shah, Senior Scholar at Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, lauded the appointment. “He is a true public health expert. Great move by the Biden Administration to pick someone with his depth of understanding,” said Shah.
“He has been a student of multiple outbreaks, so can ‘see around the corner’ — relative to most others — with what the US can expect and plan for,” said Shah.
Venture capitalist Parag Saxena, who made a $10 million gift to Brown University earlier this month to expand the Center for Contemporary South Asia and to support research on public health policy, said: “This is a great position for Ashish. He will bring a lot of value to the role.”
Saxena echoed Shah’s remarks, noting that Jha in 2014 was one of two people most knowledgeable about the Ebola scare. “He will bring a great perspective both nationally and globally; he will think about the inter-connectivity of the world, which is critical during this pandemic.”
During a news briefing on Aug. 18, 2020 organized by Ethnic Media Services, Jha predicted that life would look very different post-pandemic. “Society will be changed in very profound ways. We may decide there are certain things we did before that we just don’t want to do anymore.”
“It will take years for us to realize the profound impact of this pandemic.”
Jha said he was very optimistic about Covid vaccines, which, at that point, were still in the pipeline. But he expressed caution. “One of the misconceptions people have is that when we have a vaccine, the pandemic will be over just like that. That’s not entirely right.”
At the briefing, Jha was critical of the former Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic. “America may have the worst response of any country in the world,” he stated. “We are doing much much worse than Western European countries and Southeast Asian countries.”
Speaking about India, the public health expert said India’s early lockdowns were an effective approach to stemming the spread of Covid, even as they pushed millions of people further into poverty, especially day laborers. “India took the virus very seriously,” he said.
But, added Jha, there was a sort of “magical thinking” that the pandemic would be over in a couple of months. “It was clear that there was no long-term planning.” His words rang true in the spring of 2021, when India found itself hugely unprepared to deal with an onslaught of an estimated 10 million infections, and numerous hospitalizations and deaths as the Delta variant took hold.
Jha, who was born in Bihar, took up his role as Dean of Public Health in September 2020.
He joined Brown after leading the Harvard Global Health Institute and teaching at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. A general internist who practiced previously with the West Roxbury V.A. in Massachusetts, he had continued his practice at the Providence V.A. Medical Center.
In a statement, Brown noted that Jha’s research focuses on improving the quality of health care systems with a specialized focus on how national policies impact care. He has led some of the seminal work comparing the performance of the U.S. health system to those of other high-income countries to better understand why the U.S. spends more but often achieves less in population health.
