Zients’ departure comes at a natural inflection point in the pandemic, with confirmed cases plunging from more than 700,000 per day in mid-January at the peak of the omicron wave to regarding 33,000 per day now, according to The Washington Post’s rolling seven-day average. Administration officials are seeking to balance the desire of much of the country to return to normal following five viral waves that took nearly a million lives, while protecting the most vulnerable once morest another uptick in infections, citing the rise in covid cases overseas and indicators of more virus in recent wastewater tracking.
Biden’s selection of Jha, praised by administration officials and allies as a pragmatic communicator, also reflects the administration’s belief that the pandemic is moving to a new stage where the United States must accept some level of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, much as it does for other respiratory viruses.
If the virus surges once more, “it can’t be the kind of thing that sidetracks the country,” said Andy Slavitt, who served as a senior adviser on the response before stepping down last year. “We’re going to need to mount a response — but we have to do it in a different way than we did over the course of 2020 and 2021, when it became an all-consuming thing.”
But Jha also is set to inherit challenges that the White House is facing over its strategy and public communication. Senate Republicans are balking at an additional covid funding package, insisting that the Biden administration first account for trillions of dollars in prior spending on the response. Some public-health experts also have panned the administration for its messaging and decisions that they say have failed to protect those most at risk for severe disease, faulting the Centers and Disease Control and Prevention’s recent guidance that led many Americans to remove their masks, although others said that new metrics were appropriate for this phase of the pandemic.
Officials said that Zients, who oversaw an unprecedented drive to vaccinate tens of millions of Americans, had planned to serve as coronavirus coordinator for regarding six months but successive surges, first by the delta variant last summer and then by the omicron variant last November, led him to extend his role. He was a business executive before joining the Obama administration as a senior management and budget official in 2009, and went on to lead the National Economic Council. He later served as a co-chairman of Biden’s transition team.
“We are all very sad that he is leaving. He really is a terrific person and extremely competent and effective,” said Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser.
Natalie Quillian, Zients’ deputy, will also be leaving the administration next month following working to coordinate surge responses across the country, international vaccine donations and the drafting of the administration’s covid strategies. Other officials on the team may similarly depart in the coming weeks, with many having worked intensely on the covid response for more than a year, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal staffing plans.
Jha, who will take over as the White House coronavirus coordinator, has become a well-known commentator on national television and in other media, where he has been praised for helping explain the pandemic to a wide variety of audiences. He will also be the first person of color to lead the response to a pandemic that has taken a significant toll on communities of color, and Jha’s appointment reflects Biden’s ongoing commitment to equity, officials said.
The White House had increasingly coordinated with Jha on its covid response and messaging, incorporating his advice into the pandemic road map that Biden released this month, said three officials.
“Dr. Jha is one of the leading public health experts in America, and a well-known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence,” Biden said.
Jha personally met with Biden last week, said two administration officials with knowledge of the meeting, as the president weighed whether to accept him as Zients’ replacement.
In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Jha warned of complacency in combating the pandemic and laid out goals for coming months.
“Let’s keep our eye on the ball,” Jha wrote. “Prepare for surges and variants … Work to ensure that schools, work, and other places of gathering remain safe … Vaccinate the world.”
We are not done
We are very likely to see more surges of infections
We may see more variants
We can’t predict everything with certainty
But we have to prepare to protect the American people whatever Mother Nature throws at us
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) March 17, 2022
In his statement, Biden recounted progress made under his administration in combating the pandemic.
“When Jeff took this job, less than 1 percent of Americans were fully vaccinated; fewer than half our schools were open; and unlike much of the developed world, America lacked any at-home coronavirus tests,” he said. “Today, almost 80 percent of adults are fully vaccinated; over 100 million are boosted; virtually every school is open; and hundreds of millions of at-home tests are distributed every month.”
Biden also acknowledged that work remains to be done.
“We need to provide tests, and treatments, and masks,” he said. “We must fight the virus overseas, prepare for new waves, and new variants — all of which can be coming. And we must work with Congress to fund these vital steps, as time is running out to stay ahead of the virus.”
Zients, who was tapped by former president Barack Obama to help oversee the 2013 repair of HealthCare. Gov, the broken federal health insurance website, had increasingly become a target of liberals who said that he had done too little to combat the global pandemic and should be fired.
The fate of the national coronavirus response also is at a crossroads, with administration officials warning that they desperately need funding to purchase tests, treatments, vaccines and other supplies to combat the virus. White House officials have been seeking billions of dollars in aid following a funding package collapsed in Congress last week, and Zients personally calling Republican senators to urge them to support the package.
“We need dollars today to buy the products that we’ll need in a few months,” said a senior administration official involved in the covid response, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the nation’s current stockpile of covid supplies.
For instance, U.S. officials will be forced to cancel a planned order of additional courses of AstraZeneca’s monoclonal antibody, Evusheld, which has helped protect immunocompromised people from covid. It requires six months to manufacture, and officials say they must ration their remaining doses.
“Without additional funding, we do not have the ability to maintain our domestic testing capacity beyond June. So following spending the last year building up our testing capacity, Congress now risks squandering that capacity heading into the second half of this year,” said another senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss budget negotiations.
In his White House role, Zients built out a team of several dozen officials who absorbed much of the pandemic-response portfolio that would have gone to the Department of Health and Human Services in previous administrations, a structure that sometimes contributed to confusion and tensions over who had decision-making authority.
Zients “was the right person in the right place at the right time,” wrote Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner during the Trump administration. “He got us through a hard period of covid by leveraging his deep expertise in using the tools of government to advance health.”
Tyler Pager and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.
