Ashish Jha: Biden’s COVID response chief

The Bihar-born Harvard physician will lead America’s fight against the virus

In early 2020, when the U.S. was confronting the first wave of COVID-19, with its health system starting to feel the strain, a Harvard physician had said on a morning news show: “We can either have a national quarantine now, two weeks, get a grip on where things are, and then reassess, or we can not, wait another week, and when things look really terrible, be forced into it.”

Almost two years later, the public health expert is saying, “pulling back on mask mandates for now is very reasonable,” as he advises keeping testing rates high for a possible new surge. The man is Indian-origin physician Dr. Ashish Jha, U.S. President Joe Biden’s newly-appointed COVID-19 response coordinator, who will replace Jeffrey D. Zients, a management consultant.

Dr. Jha’s appointment comes at a time when America is entering a new phase of the pandemic. After successive waves tested the limits of the country’s public health system and claimed over a million lives, COVID-19 numbers are now in decline. As three quarters of the country's population are vaccinated at least once, and as it closely watches for the threat of the new BA.2 variant driving a surge in Europe, Dr. Jha’s appointment signifies a strategic shift in the country’s pandemic response.

The Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Jha brings to the table almost two decades of experience in public health and health policy research. Before assuming his current position at Brown in 2020, he was the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and professor of global health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As a doctor of internal medicine, he has practised in Massachusetts and Providence.

Born in Pursaulia, Bihar, in 1970, he first moved to Canada in 1979 and then to the U.S. in 1983. An economics graduate, Dr. Jha, before pursuing internal medicine training at the University of California, got his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1997. In 2004, he earned his masters of public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He has to his name “groundbreaking” research on Ebola and jointly heading West Africa’s strategy to tackle the outbreak of the disease in 2014. Dr. Jha’s academic research, of over 200 empirical papers, focuses on enhancing the quality of healthcare systems and how national policies impact healthcare. He has studied extensively how state funds for health can be utilised for efficiency.

Offering straightforward yet measured advice at almost every stage of the pandemic on multiple television shows and through clear and comprehensive Twitter threads, Dr. Jha became “America’s everyman expert on Covid-19,” according to health news site STAT.