Biden picks former FDA chief to lead vaccine effort
Presidentelect Joe Biden has chosen Dr. David Kessler to help lead the program to accelerate development of COVID19 vaccines and treatments, according to transition officials.
Kessler, a pediatrician and lawyer who headed the Food and Drug Administration during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, has been a key adviser to Biden on COVID19 policy and is cochair of the transition team’s COVID19 task force.
He will replace Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a researcher and former drug company executive. Kessler will share top responsibilities for the initiative with Gen. Gustave Perna, who will continue as chief operating officer, according to a Biden transition spokesperson. The incoming administration has decided to phase out the Trump administration’s name for the program, Operation Warp Speed, spokesperson Jen Psaki said Friday.
“OWS is the Trump team’s name for their program,” Psaki wrote on Twitter, using the program’s initials. “We are phasing in a new structure, which will have a different name than OWS.”
Psaki added that the Biden COVID response would be run out of the White House. Dr. Bechara Choucair, a former commissioner of Chicago’s health department, will “oversee vaccinations efforts,” Psaki said, including working to fulfill Biden’s promise of getting “100 million COVID vaccine shots into the arms of the American people” by his 100th day in office.
Although Operation Warp Speed is widely credited with making possible the development of two highly effective coronavirus vaccines in record time, it has been much less successful at actually delivering the shots to the public — a complex task it shares with numerous federal, state and local authorities.
The Trump administration had vowed to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of 2020, but as of Thursday, just over 11 million inoculations had been given, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At some vaccination sites, lines of elderly people have waited for hours waiting for a vaccine; at others, a lack of willing recipients is forcing providers to offer the shots to random passersby, before the doses expire.
In the late fall, Kessler warned Biden that the vaccine effort was not prepared for getting the shots into people’s arms. The transition team said last week that the presidentelect intended to create vaccination sites in high school gyms, convention centers and mobile units to reach highrisk populations.
In addition to working to speed delivery of vaccines throughout the country, Kessler is expected to increase the emphasis on development of treatments, and he plans to begin a major antiviral development program for treatment of COVID19, according to transition officials.
After leaving the FDA, Kessler served as dean of the Yale School of Medicine, followed by a stint as dean of the UC San Francisco Medical School. After blowing the whistle on financial irregularities at the university, he was dismissed as dean, but after an independent auditor concluded he was correct, the university apologized and he stayed on as a professor.