Is Biden's New COVID Czar Any Better Than the Rest?

On Thursday, Joe Biden named a practicing physician, Ashish Jha, to succeed Jeff Zients as the face of the administration’s pandemic response.

Jha was the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and was frequently seen on television news programs. What set him apart was his ability to take complicated medical jargon and turn it (almost) into English. He also wasn’t as dismissive of ordinary people’s concerns about government efforts to deal with the crisis.

Significantly, one of Dr. Jha’s first tweets in his new job was to threaten more restrictions.

We are not done

We are very likely to see more surges of infections

We may see more variants

We can’t predict everything with certainty

But we have to prepare to protect the American people whatever Mother Nature throws at us

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) March 17, 2022

New positive tests are averaging around 32,000 per day, down from 700,000 positive tests per day in January. But suppose they start shooting up again, as Dr. Fauci and others have predicted. Have we learned anything?

Hopefully, we have.

Washington Post:

If the virus surges again, “it can’t be the kind of thing that sidetracks the country,” said Andy Slavitt, who served as a senior adviser on the response before stepping down last year. “We’re going to need to mount a response — but we have to do it in a different way than we did over the course of 2020 and 2021, when it became an all-consuming thing.”

But Jha is set to inherit challenges that the White House is facing over its strategy and public communication. Senate Republicans are balking at an additional covid funding package, insisting the Biden administration first account for trillions of dollars in prior spending on the response.

Make no mistake: Dr. Jha is a public health bureaucrat with a public health bureaucrat’s agenda. But at least this time, there’s going to be pushback from a large segment of the public and many members of Congress if anything other than common-sense measures to combat the resurgent virus is proposed.

The American people are no longer helpless bystanders. We’ve got skin in the game and demand a voice.