In his first major policy announcement today, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden named Vivek Murthy, as a co-chair, and Atul Gawande as a member of a COVID-19 Advisory Board. The 13-member task force of doctors and scientists, Biden said, will help shape his “approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations.”

The U.S. is facing a third spike in COVID-19 infections. New cases are rising in at least 40 states, with more than 10 million total infections and more than 237,000 deaths.

Biden’s task force will consult with state and local officials to determine the public health and economic steps necessary to get the virus under control, to deliver immediate relief to families, to address ongoing racial and ethnic disparities, and to safely reopen schools and businesses. Its members have served in previous administrations, including two who served under President Donald Trump, leading America’s response to nationwide and worldwide public health crises.

From 2014 to 2017, Murthy, 43, was the Surgeon General of the United States. During his tenure, he published the first Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health and launched campaigns to address the opioid crisis, e-cigarette use among youth, and mental health and emotional well- being. As Vice Admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he also commanded a uniformed service of 6,600 public health officers addressing public health threats, including from Ebola and Zika.

In April, Murthy published Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. “We have a massive, deadly epidemic hidden in plain sight: loneliness. It is as harmful to health as smoking and far more common…(Murthy’s) gripping stories of the science and suffering makes clear, we can do something about it,” says Atul Gawande about the best-selling book.  

Murthy says he discovered the art of healing watching his parents treat patients like family in his father’s medical clinic in Miami, Florida. His parents, Hallegere and Myetriae Murthy, immigrants from Karnataka, India, came to the U.S. after working in the U.K. and Canada.

He finished at the head of his class at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, whose alumni include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. While at the school, Murthy created a program to have high school students mentor middle school students.

Murthy received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. At Harvard, with his sister Rashmi, he launched a program that sent American college students to India to do peer education work on HIV/AIDS. He also started the Swasthya Project, a community health partnership which trained young women in rural India to be health educators and basic health care providers for their communities.

Murthy earned his M.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Yale University. It was evident, while Murthy was a first-year medical student, that he was “instilled with a sense of…commitment to making sure that everybody has access to quality health care,” Howard P. Forman, one of his teachers told the Yale Medical Magazine.

After finishing medical school, Murthy founded TrialNetworks, social networking platforms that enhance communication, collaboration, and overall efficiency in clinical trials of potential drugs. He completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and later taught at the Harvard Medical School. He resides in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Alice Chen, who is also a doctor, and their two young children.

This morning, after the announcement of his inclusion in Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, Atul Gawande tweeted: “..I am confident we can get the virus under control, save lives and livelihoods, and bring people back together again.”

Gawande’s work at Boston-based Ariadne Labs, which he founded, includes scaling COVID-19 testing, demonstrating how other countries have successfully protected healthcare workers, developing tools to guide decision makers with vaccine allocation planning, and managing COVID-19 in surgical systems.

The son of Indian immigrant physicians, Gawande, 55, grew up in Athens, a small town in Ohio. Following degrees at Stanford and Oxford, he developed an interest in health care policy as a Congressional staff member, then became the chief health and social policy director for the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. After a year with the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful effort at health reform, he returned to complete his medical degree at Harvard.

Gawande has led teams that created simple, scalable tools that rapidly changed medical practice nationally and globally during critical moments: a hospital worker checklist during the 2014 Ebola Virus Outbreak, a checklist for prescribing opioids to those in chronic pain, and a patient care checklist for the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic. He has written four best-selling books, including The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009), and his most recent, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014) .

For more than two decades, Gawande has worked on both direct patient care and population-level impact, asking a fundamental question: How do we fix health care systems to deliver better care for every person everywhere?

in 2007, Murthy became politically active, working on candidate Barack Obama’s New England steering committee. The next year, after Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Presidential election, Murthy and fellow physicians founded Doctors for Obama. After Obama was elected, the group changed its name to Doctors for America, which now has over 18,000 doctors and medical students as members.

Murthy has lectured widely on health care reform and physician advocacy, and his writings have been published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Science, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and The Washington Post.

In 2014, after Murthy was nominated to be Surgeon General, Scott Berkowitz, a classmate at the Yale Medical School told the Yale Medical Magazine “Vivek’s ambition and talents are only exceeded by the genuineness and warmness of his personality. He will continue to make great contributions wherever he invests himself, and our country will benefit greatly from his service,”

UPDATE: On December 7, President-elect Joe Biden announced that Vivek Murthy will be the next Surgeon General, subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

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