NEW YORK: A Bihar-born global health expert has been appointed by US President Joe Biden to the White House position of overseeing the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “I am excited to name Dr Ashish Jha as the new White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator”, Biden said in March while announcing the appointment. “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.”

Jha, who is the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, is one of the most popular experts that the media reaches out to for explaining the Covid pandemic and the efforts to control it. “For all the progress we’ve made in this pandemic (and there is a lot). We still have important work to do to protect Americans’ lives and well being. So when @POTUS asked me to serve, I was honoured to have the opportunity,” Jha said in a tweet.

He will be joining Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, National Drug Control Policy Director Rahul Gupta, and Center for Medicare Director Meena Seshamani at the higher echelons of the US healthcare system. Jha succeeds Jeff Zients, who is leaving the White House after 14 months during which two variants, Delta and Omicron, fueled a surge in Covid cases that the US struggled to contain. Zients leaves office with 65 percent of Americans having received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine and nearly 77 per cent have been fully vaccinated with the seven-day average of infections plummeting from 806,851 in mid-January to 30,570 in mid-March.