Jha was born in Pursaulia in Bihar in 1970 to parents who were educators. The family moved to Canada in 1979 and to the US in 1983. He did his BA in economics at Columbia University and switched to medicine, he got his MD and master’s in public health from Harvard University. He came to Brown from Harvard, where he was the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and the dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He had also served as the co-chair of the Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, which examined the failure of the international community’s response to the disease. Even while he was heading the Brown University’s School of Public Health, he continued to practice medicine at a hospital for ex-military members. During the Covid pandemic, he made frequent appearances on TV, wrote op-eds for leading newspapers and was often quoted by reporters. The medical news website, STAT, called him “network TV’s everyman expert on Covid” with the qualities of a “telegenic phenom” and a “great communicator”.

Zients was a businessman and a bureaucrat, unlike Jha who is a doctor. He is a former CEO of an investment company and a member of Facebook’s board of directors. Before that, he had served as a special assistant to former President Barack Obama and as the director of the National Economic Council.

The changeover to a doctor marks an inflexion point in the pandemic where the logistics of mass vaccination and testing are in place and the future task is to monitor and prepare for new variations or other developments.