Ashish Jha takes on the challenge of tackling COVID-19 in the USA
March 17, 2022
U.S. President Joe Biden today announced the appointment of Ashish K. Jha, as the next White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator starting April 5. “Dr. Jha is…a well-known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence (on TV). 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,” Biden noted in a statement issued by The White House.
The incidence of daily new COVID cases has shrunk from over 900,000 in mid-January, at the peak of the Omicron wave, to around 26,000 currently. Two thirds of the Americans have been full vaccinated; including 89% of those over age 65.
Yet Biden’s job approval rating among the U.S. public is now around 42%, a sharp ten-point drop since he took office in January 2021. In fact, he has the lowest approval rating for any American President since 1945, except President Donald Trump.
The low approval for Biden is in part due to the continuing health and economic impact of the virus. The other major reason is the sharp rise in inflation, which Americans experience daily when they buy gasoline for their cars or bread and other food items.
News reports point out that Jha, 52-years-old, will be the first person of color to lead the response to a pandemic; at a time when COVID has caused major health and economic damage to the nation’s black and Latino population. Jha’s appointment as a person of color reflects Biden’s ongoing commitment to equity, his officials told The Washington Post. Biden himself did not say so, at least, publicly.
However Jha, like most Indian Americans, is not from a family that suffered historical discrimination in the U.S. He attended Boonton High School in New Jersey. A typical home in Boonton is valued at half a million dollars, which is two to five times greater than the value of homes in towns with a predominantly black population in the state. Jha then went on to receive degrees from Ivy League colleges.
Jha will take a short-term leave of absence from Brown University in Rhode Island, where he is the dean of the School of Public Health, to serve in The White House. “Throughout this pandemic, we have worked at Brown to improve public understanding and information, and inform policy at every level of government here and around the globe,” Jha said in a statement issued by Brown.
He is leading national and international analysis of key issues relating to COVID and advising state and federal policy makers, including Biden. Earlier, Jha co-chaired an international commission that examined the global response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. An author of over 200 papers, he has written about what could be done to strengthen preparedness and response to pandemics, like Ebola, Zika and COVID, by the World Health Organization and other international agencies.
With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation and other sources, Jha’s research focuses on how national policies can improve the quality of health care systems. He has led research to better understand why the U.S. spends more but often achieves less in population health.
Jha joined Brown in 2020, 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 Veterans Administration (VA) in Massachusetts, he continued his practice at the Providence VA Medical Center.
He trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and completed his general medicine fellowship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.
In 2004, he received his Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 1997, he earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and in 1992, a bachelor’s degree in economics from Columbia University. He graduated at the head of his class from Boonton High School in New Jersey.
His four years at Columbia, “were certainly the most important years of my life intellectually and personally,” Jha told Columbia College Today. “Part of it was having incredible mentors…I went to a high school that, to be perfectly frank, was racist, and I was one of the very few non-white people in that school. I came out very confused because I felt like I should be ashamed of being an Indian yet it was such an important part of who I was. Among the many great things I learned at Columbia was that I could be Indian and I could be American.”
Jha was born in Pursaulia, in the state of Bihar, India. In 1979, he moved with his family to Canada and then, in 1983, to the United States. Jha is married to his wife Debra Stump, an environmental lawyer; they have three children.
Jha, is the fourth Indian American to serve as a senior official in Biden’s health care team: the others being Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General; Atul Gawande, the Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Global Health, United States Agency for International Development; and Rahul Gupta, the Director of National Drug Control Policy.
Jha’s appointment is a big boost to Brown University’s stature, especially in the field of Healthcare. In 2018, Jerrold Rosenberg was sentenced to 51 months in prison for fraud and receiving $188,000 in kickbacks to prescribe a highly-addictive opioid drug. Rosenberg, a professor at Brown medical school since 1983, was fired by Brown. The case received extensive media coverage, including a Fortune story with the headline: Ivy League Doctor Gets 4 Years in Prison.
Following the news of Jha’s new role in The White House, Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, noted in a statement issued by Brown, that, Jha, a highly regarded Brown academic leader, “will bring to President Biden and our nation what he has brought — and will bring back — to Brown: an unrivaled commitment to improving public health equitably, effectively, creatively, with heart and a commitment to science.”
Since the pandemic began in the U.S. in March 2020, there have been about 968,000 deaths and 80 million confirmed cases. Nearly 60% of the deaths have occurred since January 2021, when Biden became President.
In the future, perhaps there will be few major outbreaks of the virus. Perhaps COVID will be an annual, recurring virus, but causing a far lower level of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, similar to the flu.
Not surprisingly, Republicans have been attacking Biden for “hurting the economy” as a result both the damage caused by the virus and his mask and vaccination mandates, aimed at preventing the spread of the virus. The Republicans have also stalled the Democrat Administration’s request for additional funding to tackle COVID-19, demanding an accounting for the trillions of dollars already spent. These are the challenges that Jha faces as he seeks to tackle COVID.
Jha has had experience dealing with such issues. From 2009 to 2013, under President Obama, he served in a number of roles at the federal government level, including as special assistant to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. In the statement released by Brown, Jha noted that, “I am honored to accept President Biden’s invitation to serve.”
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