Palm to join Biden team
Andrea Palm, Wisconsin’s top health official during the pandemic, is joining the Biden administration.
Wisconsin’s top health official, who has been leading the state’s COVID-19 fight, is leaving for a job with the federal government under incoming President Joe Biden.
Andrea Palm, secretary-designee of the state Department of Health Services, has been nominated deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her last day at DHS is Wednesday.
Speaking Monday morning at the opening of Prevea’s COVID-19 vaccination clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Gov. Tony Evers praised Palm’s work.
“Andrea Palm did an outstanding job for us as secretary of health services in the state of Wisconsin. She’s a consummate public servant. She always worked hard for the people that needed help in the health care world. She will be a real great addition to the Biden administration. We hate to lose her,” Evers said. “We always felt very, very confident in her work.”
Palm’s new job was first reported Monday by The Washington Post.
Palm has led the state agency throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, although Republicans who control the Senate have refused to vote to confirm her as DHS secretary. They also threatened to fire her, angered by her and Evers’ efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic — including Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order, which was struck downin May by the state Supreme Court.
Palm will have the number two spot at a key agency for Biden, who has
pledged to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines — and deploy the National Guard to get more shots into arms — to accelerate the nation’s stumbling vaccine rollout.
Karen Timberlake, who was DHS secretary under former Gov. Jim Doyle during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, will serve as interim secretary, Evers said.
Timberlake’s first day will be Jan. 25. “Karen is well-known in the state of Wisconsin in this arena. She used to be health services secretary years ago. She worked at the University of Wisconsin System in the health population world,” Evers said. “She starts Monday. Andrea will be leaving today or tomorrow. There will be really no break. We had a great secretary. We’ll have a great interim secretary moving forward.”
Timberlake, a partner and licensed lobbyist for Michael Best Strategies, previously served as the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute director and as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
She has been working as a lobbyist for a number of health care interests and organizations.
Timberlake also served as Doyle’s director of the Office of State Employment Relations before being appointed as deputy health secretary at DHS in 2007. She was DHS secretary from 2008 until the end of Doyle’s term at the beginning of 2011.
The changes come as Wisconsin’s vaccine rollout has faced criticism from Republicans, who say it has been slow and overly bureaucratic.
As of Monday, 35,000 people had received both doses of vaccine in the state and 239,102 doses had been administered. COVID-19 cases are declining again after a post-holiday rise, but deaths remain high. The state on Monday reported 1,083 new cases and 19 deaths from the virus.
At UW-Green Bay, Evers called for patience with Wisconsin’s vaccination efforts.
“We talk about the fact that we want to vaccinate everybody 65 and over. I’m in that category, so I’m cool with that. But the bottom line is that there’s 900,000 of them in the state of Wisconsin,” he said. “We have to move forward in a way that’s reasonable and have reasonable vaccine (supply). But we also have to be patient.”
Late last week Evers voiced frustration that the federal reserve of COVID-19 vaccines was already exhausted, calling it “a slap in the face to the people of Wisconsin.”
Evers said when he and other governors spoke with Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last week, Pence and Azar gave the impression that they’d be shipping states vaccine doses that had been stockpiled.
In a Friday media briefing, Evers said the situation was “plain old obfuscation” by the federal government.
The federal vaccine rollout has faced broad criticism.
Two weeks into January, the federal government was a little more than halfway to its goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans. That goal was supposed to be reached by Jan. 1. The slow performance has worried health experts and jeopardizes hopes of returning to some degree of normal life by summer or fall.
Evers said he’s confident that the Biden administration will be responsive to the state’s vaccine needs.
“That’s kind of the silent partner here. We have to have partnership with the federal government,” Evers said. “I believe the Biden administration understands the importance of this. We will get the vaccines that we need.”
Evers also defended the state’s role in the vaccine rollout.
“Doing it in a reasonable, step-bystep basis has not been a barrier,” he said. “The people that are making those recommendations to me are doing it as quickly as possible. The barrier is making sure we have the vaccines that we need. We’ll be making some announcements on expanding that in the very near future also.”
State health officials said last week that Wisconsin residents who are 65 and older could be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine shot as early as this month if the state adopts new federal recommendations.
Palm previously served as senior counselor to the federal HHS secretary under President Barack Obama.
One of her former HHS colleagues, Leslie Dach, praised Palm, saying, “She is kind, she is tough, and she knows the issues.”
“Andrea Palm will be a great deputy secretary of HHS. She knows the building and has deep respect for the people who work there,” said Dach, who now serves as chair of Protect Our Care, a coalition of advocacy groups dedicated to preventing the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “In Wisconsin, she did an extraordinary job combating the pandemic, respecting the science and the facts, protecting the public health, and telling the truth to the people she served.”
Palm was one of five women nominated by Biden on Monday to serve in number two spots at federal agencies.
Another is Cindy Marten, a UW-La Crosse alum, who was nominated to serve as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education.
“Marten has had a remarkable career as a teacher, principal and superintendent, and we look forward to seeing how she will use her talents to serve our nation’s schools,” the university said in a statement.
Marten, the superintendent of San Diego Unified School District, said in a tweet that she would put “teachers, students, and parents first.”
“Work Hard. Be Kind. Dream Big,” she wrote. “Let’s do this!”