For the past two years, as the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on American lives and the world at large, Dr. Ashish K. Jha has been there to make sense of it all. …
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Now Dr. Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, a respected academic and a practicing internist with minimal government experience, is about to join the White House as President Biden’s new coronavirus response coordinator. A preternaturally calm 51-year-old whom the health news site Stat once described as “network TV’s Everyman expert on Covid,” he is going to take charge of the most complicated federal response to a crisis in modern history.
… his communication skills will help…
“Probably his biggest challenge is that he doesn’t know government, he doesn’t have experience, and it does take a while to know who you should call, who you can’t and how you get through the hierarchy,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s top medical adviser for the pandemic, who will work closely with Dr. Jha. “But he’s a smart guy. He’ll figure it out.”
Dr. Fauci said the same thing about Walk-Back Walensky when she struggled early. This means Jha is in over his head.
Dr. Jha’s selection signals two things…First, the president wants to keep the federal pandemic response centered in the White House, instead of delegating it to the Department of Health and Human Services or one of its agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Second, he wants to put it in the hands of a public health expert. Dr. Jha is replacing Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant…
Entrepreneur and management consultant? Those are contra-indicated for coronavirus response coordinator. I had never fucking heard of Zients until Bret Stephens opined that Biden should get rid of him a couple months ago.
...most experts, including Dr. Fauci, believe the numbers will rise again here. Yet many Americans do not want to think about the pandemic anymore. Mask mandates have lifted all over the country...and many Americans will most likely resist putting them back on, even if conditions warrant it.
“How this plays out depends on how the dynamics of Covid play out, and frankly how much time elapses before he has to tell the American people we’re in trouble as well...And that could plausibly happen before he steps into this role, or on Day 1.”
The Times quotes experts, it's part of their style guide, experts who are fucking un-the-fuck-known to the public. I don't follow the Times' style guide.
With his gentle manner and professorial glasses, Dr. Jha has often been a soothing figure on television — unlike Mr. Zients, whose public speaking tends to sound stiff and scripted. Dr. Jha speaks in plain, easy-to-understand language, assuming that ordinary people “don’t want to hear a debate about the R-naught,”...referring to a way to measure the transmissibility of a virus. They do, he said, “want to hear what the new variants mean to them, when their kids might be eligible for a vaccine.”
With that in mind, Dr. Jha could help solve what has been one of the administration’s biggest failings: its confusing messaging, which stems partly from a lack of coordination between agencies. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., has fumbled at times in communicating the agency’s coronavirus guidance to Americans.
...Fauci...has become a polarizing figure and a target of frequent Republican attacks, to which he has at times responded heatedly in public and while testifying on Capitol Hill.
I don't think that's fair to Dr. Fauci. He has been every administration's spokesperson on public health crises going back to AIDS and President Reagan. What is different in the COVID era is that the steel plates inside Grand Old Putinist heads have begun to rust and and degrade the already braincompromised. When you have to appear before Congress on pain of contempt and Paul Rand calls you a liar I think you do respond that if anybody's lying here today it's Senator Rand.
...Dr. Jha has been able to reach people across the political spectrum. He makes it a point to appear on conservative channels and is a regular guest on Newsmax, a favorite of former President Donald J. Trump.
Wow. Newsmax. RT, too?
“He seems like a credible guy on TV,” said Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator who is close to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. (Jennings’s advice to Dr. Jha: “Don’t treat Congress the way Fauci has.”)
The Times style guide also commands these twee formalities. Full formal names, "Dr. Anthony S. Fauci," "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" as if we care what his middle initial is and didn't know which country he was president of. "Mr." thereafter: "Mr. Putin," "Mr. Biden." So I don't do that neither.
..experts are hopeful that Dr. Jha will be well positioned to tone down the divisiveness, as neither his appearances on conservative outlets like Fox News nor his active Twitter feed (over 340,000 followers) have incited much backlash so far.
“He is a deeply civil personality. He comes across as a caring, smart, listening person who also knows how to speak across political divides in language that’s intelligible. There are not a lot of people that can do that.”-expert
...
“Dr. Jha has been a comforting voice for many; however, this is coming at the expense of the immunocompromised, whose concerns and risks he has continually minimized or discounted.”-advocate for the immunocompromised.
...when the C.D.C. cut the isolation period for Covid-19 patients to five days from 10 days in December — a move that many public health experts criticized — Dr. Jha tweeted that it was “terrific.” And The New York Times published a guest essay from him last month in which he called the C.D.C.’s move to relax its masking guidelines “a welcome change.” The article appeared on the same day the new guidelines were announced.
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Dr. Jha’s supporters say that he will push back if he disagrees with Mr. Biden or other White House officials on pandemic strategy.
“He never held back,” said Dr. Julio Frenk, the president of the University of Miami, who worked closely with Dr. Jha when both were at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s obviously a very different context, but when he felt things were not going well at Harvard University, he did not hold back in expressing that.”
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Jha will also have to chart a course through a period that could bring more tumult — and persuade Americans that it is the right one.
“He’s been able to boil things down into news that people can use, so people have really looked to him for a candid assessment,” Dr. Sharfstein said. “That obviously isn’t the whole job, but I do think it’s his superpower.”
