Biden taps Becerra, Murthy to lead health team amid pandemic
President- elect Joe Biden named California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his Health and Human Services secretary on Monday and filled out a team that will lead the incoming administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Becerra will also be tasked with expanding the Affordable Care Act, one of Biden’s key health goals beyond curbing the virus outbreak.
Biden also announced he was returning Vivek Murthy to the role of surgeon general, a job he held under President Barack Obama, but this time his role will be expanded to include managing the U.S. government response to the coronavirus. Murthy will work closely with Jeff Zients, one of Biden’s transition co-chairs, who was named coordinator of the ovid-19 response and counselor to the president. Zients was a top economic adviser to Obama and is credited with reviving the troubled Obamacare enrollment website. Former White House and Pentagon senior adviser Natalie Quillian will serve as Zients’s deputy coordinator. Rochelle Walensky, the infectious diseases chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, was named director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Biden also named Marcella Nunez-Smith as Covid-19 Equity Task Force Chair, a new job that will coordinate the government’s response to the virus. Nunez-Smith is an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and co-chair of the Biden transition’s coronavirus advisory board.
Anthony Fauci, who became a celebrated and trusted voice on the pandemic response while President Donald Trump downplayed its threats, will keep his current job as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases but also serve as Biden’s chief medical adviser on the coronavirus.
“This trusted and accomplished team of leaders will bring the highest level of integrity, scientific rigor, and crisis-management experience to one of the toughest challenges America has ever faced -getting the pandemic under control,” Biden said in a statement released by his transition team.
Fauci, speaking to CNN on Monday morning, lauded Biden’s picks. “I’ve had considerable interactions with all of these individuals and they are outstanding,” he said. He said he wasn’t yet sure what shape Biden’s coronavirus task force would take, and that his role wouldn’t be “substantially different” than his current one. Trump has largely frozen out Fauci and has rarely engaged directly with his task force.