Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy will co-chair a coronavirus task force that President-elect Joe Biden will announce Monday as his first major step in fighting the pandemic, his top campaign promise.
Following his inauguration on January 20, Biden will issue a series of executive orders reversing some of President Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions. It will return the United States to the Paris Agreement, remove the travel ban on people from some Muslim-majority countries, resume WHO funding and restore protections for undocumented immigrants brought in as children, according to a report by The Washington Post.
Murthy, an American Indian, will co-chair the task force with David Kessler, a former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor at Yale University. The team will have 12 members.
The president-elect spoke briefly about this team in his victory speech on Saturday. “On Monday, I will appoint a group of leading scientists and experts as Transition Advisors to help take Biden-Harris’ Covid plan and turn it into an action plan that begins January 20, 2021,” he said.
“That plan will be built on the foundations of science. It will be built on compassion, empathy and concern. “
The president-elect did not elaborate, but several news reports named Murthy as co-chair.
Biden ran his presidential campaign promising to address the epidemic as his top priority and accused Trump of failing to respond adequately to the crisis and not being transparent about its severity.
More than 237,000 Americans have died and 9 million have been infected and new cases have risen again.
Murthy had been advising Biden for months on Covid-19; once a week, according to some accounts, that led to speculation about a possible place for the American Indian physician who rose to fame as President Barack Obama’s Surgeon General.
He was the 19th Surgeon General of the United States, also called America’s Doctor, from December 15, 2014 to April 21, 2017.
Many Indian-Americans hope to land somewhere in the Biden administration, and there is even a list of names put together by potential people named by the Asia-Latin America and Pacific Islands (AAPI) Victory Fund, a group of Democrats promoting the AAPI candidates and political effort.
He gave the list to the president of Biden’s transition team, Ted Kaufman, in September. It contained “dozens” of names, including “many American Indians.” But the group has been quiet about names and numbers.
Each incoming administration is expected to fill some 4,000 federal positions with political appointments, from cabinet members to senior officials in state, defense and other departments.
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