President-elect Joe Biden has announced his nominees to lead public health in his administration, but first and foremost, to try to put the nation on track in responding to COVID-19. "This team of world-class medical experts and public servants will be ready on day one to implement a full government response to this crisis," Biden tweeted Monday morning. "Together, we'll overcome our toughest challenges and make health care a right for all Americans."
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, formerly a member of Congress, will head up Health and Human Services. Becerra not only helped make the Affordable Care Act a thing while in Congress, he's led the states' attorneys general in defending it in court from Donald Trump. Rochelle Walensky, an infectious-disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital is joining Becerra to head up the Centers for Disease Control, drawing huzzahs from all over the country. Dara Kass, an emergency medicine physician and associate professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center spoke for many: "She will immediately build back trust in the CDC and help people understand what they really need to know. … Science is back." Harvard Medical School's Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist, wrote that the news "sent me into a sort of public health euphoria."
True to his promise to tackle racial disparities in health care and the response to coronavirus, Biden is hiring Marcella Nunez-Smith as COVID-19 equity task force chair to head up a new working group charged with reducing health disparities. Nunez-Smith is a professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Yale, and is the founding director of Yale’s Equity Research and Innovation Center, focused on addressing inequities in our healthcare system.
Dr. Anthony Fauci will stay on in public service as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but will have an additional role, as Biden's chief medical adviser. Fauci welcomed the new team. "I worked with all of them before," Fauci said Monday morning. "They're excellent choices. I mean all of them."
That includes former surgeon general under President Barack Obama, Vivek Murthy, who will return to that role. Murthy was in the role during the Ebola and Zika viruses as well as the opioid crisis. He had a special focus during his tenure on mental health, specifically combatting the effects of stress and loneliness on physical and mental well-being. So that's appropriate now.
Another Obama official tapped by Biden is Jeff Zients, a crisis manager who will serve as White House coronavirus coordinator. Zients served as director of the National Economic Council, acting director and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget under Obama, and was tapped to get the Healthcare.gov website up and running in 2013 after its disastrous first few weeks. He'll be joined by national security expert Natalie Quillian as his deputy. Quillian served as adviser to the White House chief of staff and senior adviser to the deputy national security adviser in the Obama-Biden administration and was involved in that administration's interagency response to the opioid epidemic. As a deputy campaign manager for the Biden-Harris campaign, she was in charge of COVID-19 safety for the candidates as well as all the campaign staff and volunteers.
This is a team built for a crisis, built to quickly step in and start enacting policies to stem the contagion as well as kick a mass vaccination campaign as soon as they officially hit the ground. So far, the Biden team hasn't been briefed on where the Trump team is in that effort, but there is supposed to be a briefing this week on the vaccine rollout plan thus far. Biden's team is also geared toward repairing damage done with the rest of the world, to rejoin international efforts in combatting coronavirus. They will definitely be starting at a horrifying place at home and abroad.