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.
‘Everyman expert’
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.
For policy makers, his data-centric responses, backed by practical public health experience, became guiding threads for weaving pandemic response strategies. He has also testified in two U.S. Congressional hearings on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and on the global impact of the pandemic.
Despite sounding warning bells and calling for caution, Dr. Jha has had an optimistic outlook of the pandemic. In May 2021, for instance, while talking about herd immunity, Dr. Jha wrote in a Twitter thread: “We won't be done even if we get to 80% (herd immunity). We’ll need to monitor variants, vaccinate the world, continue testing, etc. But this is all manageable. We'll settle into a new equilibrium as we do with many viruses And COVID won't dominate our lives. And that's what matters.”
Even when the Biden administration took over to steer and fix the previous administration’s response, Dr. Jha had said rejoining the WHO and reviving the U.S.’ leading role in it won’t solve things. He emphasised on how pandemics are truly global in the 21st century, and the U.S. or the West cannot just ‘lead’ alone in global health, but work with international partners, take cross-border health measures and exchange knowledge to “decolonise” global health.
While thanking Mr. Biden for appointing him as the new pandemic response chief, Dr. Jha said: “To the American people, I promise I will be straightforward and clear in sharing what we know, in explaining what we don’t know and how we will learn more, and what the future will ask of all of us.”
