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Jeff Zients to step down as Biden's COVID response coordinator
Source: Axios
Jeff Zients is set to leave his position as the White House's COVID-19 response coordinator in April, President Biden announced Thursday.
State of play: Zients will be replaced by Ashish Jha, who currently serves as dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. Biden called Jha "one of the leading public health experts in America."
Zients' deputy, Natalie Quillian, will also depart from the COVID response team.
The New York Times first reported the story.
Read more: https://www.axios.com/jeff-zients-covid-response-biden-white-house-3f6032d5-6714-44e9-8599-67e4824c0292.html
2 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Congratulations to Dr. Jha. 
Jeff Zients to Leave as Biden’s Covid Czar and Be Replaced by Ashish Jha
The choice of Dr. Jha, an outspoken public health expert, is a sign that the White House believes the country is entering a new phase of the pandemic.
Dr. Ashish Jha has urged an aggressive approach to the pandemic in frequent television appearances. Credit...Elise Amendola/Associated Press
By Michael D. Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
March 17, 2022Updated 3:40 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who steered President Biden’s coronavirus response through successive pandemic waves and the largest vaccination campaign in American history, plans to leave the White House in April to return to private life, President Biden said in a statement. Mr. Zients will be replaced as the White House coronavirus coordinator by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a practicing internist who has urged an aggressive approach to the pandemic in frequent television appearances.
Dr. Jha will coordinate the government’s Covid-19 response from inside the White House, officials said. Mr. Biden called Mr. Zients “a man of service” and praised his work to “build the infrastructure we needed to deliver vaccines, tests, treatment and masks to hundreds of millions of Americans.” For the past 14 months, Mr. Zients has presided over a tumultuous and challenging stretch of the pandemic. Two highly infectious coronavirus variants, Delta and Omicron, caught the White House off guard. The public was often confused by conflicting messages.
And the vaccination campaign, while largely hailed as a success, ran into far more resistance than the president anticipated when he took office. As Mr. Zients prepares to depart, the nation’s death toll from the pandemic is about to surpass one million. Now, with three-quarters of Americans having had at least one dose of vaccine, officials said the federal response would become more of a long-term public health effort and less of a moment-by-moment crisis requiring rapid government action. If new variants of the virus spread, they said, Dr. Jha will be able to draw upon the tools his predecessor put in place during the past 14 months.
Officials said his background as a medical doctor makes him the right choice as the virus becomes more an endemic part of the country’s health challenges. In 2014, Dr. Jha was a co-chair of an international commission on the global response to the Ebola outbreak. And he has argued that agencies like the World Health Organization are critical in dealing with diseases like Ebola and Zika. Public health experts praised the selection. Dr. Rick Bright, chief executive officer of the Pandemic Prevention Institute, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation, said Dr. Jha’s skills as a communicator would “enable us to transition smoothly.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/us/politics/jeffrey-zients-ashish-jha.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share
The choice of Dr. Jha, an outspoken public health expert, is a sign that the White House believes the country is entering a new phase of the pandemic.
Dr. Ashish Jha has urged an aggressive approach to the pandemic in frequent television appearances. Credit...Elise Amendola/Associated Press
By Michael D. Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
March 17, 2022Updated 3:40 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who steered President Biden’s coronavirus response through successive pandemic waves and the largest vaccination campaign in American history, plans to leave the White House in April to return to private life, President Biden said in a statement. Mr. Zients will be replaced as the White House coronavirus coordinator by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a practicing internist who has urged an aggressive approach to the pandemic in frequent television appearances.
Dr. Jha will coordinate the government’s Covid-19 response from inside the White House, officials said. Mr. Biden called Mr. Zients “a man of service” and praised his work to “build the infrastructure we needed to deliver vaccines, tests, treatment and masks to hundreds of millions of Americans.” For the past 14 months, Mr. Zients has presided over a tumultuous and challenging stretch of the pandemic. Two highly infectious coronavirus variants, Delta and Omicron, caught the White House off guard. The public was often confused by conflicting messages.
And the vaccination campaign, while largely hailed as a success, ran into far more resistance than the president anticipated when he took office. As Mr. Zients prepares to depart, the nation’s death toll from the pandemic is about to surpass one million. Now, with three-quarters of Americans having had at least one dose of vaccine, officials said the federal response would become more of a long-term public health effort and less of a moment-by-moment crisis requiring rapid government action. If new variants of the virus spread, they said, Dr. Jha will be able to draw upon the tools his predecessor put in place during the past 14 months.
Officials said his background as a medical doctor makes him the right choice as the virus becomes more an endemic part of the country’s health challenges. In 2014, Dr. Jha was a co-chair of an international commission on the global response to the Ebola outbreak. And he has argued that agencies like the World Health Organization are critical in dealing with diseases like Ebola and Zika. Public health experts praised the selection. Dr. Rick Bright, chief executive officer of the Pandemic Prevention Institute, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation, said Dr. Jha’s skills as a communicator would “enable us to transition smoothly.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/us/politics/jeffrey-zients-ashish-jha.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share