December 9, 2020 3:56:19 pm
Vivek Murthy. (Source: Bloomberg)
Dr. Vivek Murthy, of Indian-American descent, will reprise his role as Surgeon General under the Joe Biden administration after serving under former President Barack Obama. US President-elect Joe Biden announced his elections to the health team, which will be led by Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
As a surgeon general, Murthy will have his job cut short given the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in the US He will be one of Biden’s closest advisers on containing the virus, as well as handling government public disclosure.
Dr. Murthy has more than two decades of experience serving as a physician, research scientist and former Vice Admiral in the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service.
Who is Dr. Vivek Murthy?
Born on July 10, 1977 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, Murthy grew up in Miami, where his parents moved when he was three years old. Her parents, who were also doctors, are from Karnataka.
Murthy studied at Miami Palmetto Senior High School before attending Harvard to earn his bachelor’s degree. He later completed his MD and MBA degrees at Yale. She completed her residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she later joined the faculty as a physician and instructor in internal medicine.
While still studying at Harvard in 1995, Dr. Murthy co-founded VISIONS Worldwide with his sister Rashmi, a non-profit group dedicated to educating people in India and the United States about AIDS and HIV. In 1997, she co-founded the Swasthya Community Health Partnership to train women as community health workers in rural India.
The Obama years
In 2008, Murthy found Doctors for Obama (later Doctors for America) to support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his run for the White House against Senator John McCain. Doctors for Obama, a non-profit organization comprising more than 16,000 doctors and medical students in all 50 US states, aimed to provide an affordable healthcare system for all by consulting patients and legislators equally.
In 2011, Murthy was appointed to the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Comprehensive Public Health.
On December 15, 2014, Murthy was confirmed as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States, a position he held until April 21, 2017.
As a general surgeon, Murthy focused on drug and alcohol addiction, as well as promoting a healthy lifestyle among the public. To his credit, Murthy launched efforts to increase physical activity in communities across the country, including a two-week public-private partnership with Fitbit that involved more than 600,000 people to take an industry record of 60 billion steps. . He was also an advocate for vaccination among children and associated with the child character Elmo in a popular video demystifying vaccines for parents and children.
Under biden
Murthy was appointed as one of Biden’s top three advisers to address the coronavirus ahead of the November general election. On the country’s approach to fighting the pandemic, Murthy said it must be “a dial that we go up and down, depending on the severity.”
“If we blockade the entire country without focusing our efforts, then we are going to exacerbate the ‘pandemic fatigue’ that people feel, damage jobs and the economy, close schools and damage our children’s education,” Murthy said on Fox News Sunday. .
“So we have to approach this with the precision of a scalpel rather than the force of an ax,” he said, adding that the imposition of another blockade would be a “measure of last resort.”
On November 9, Biden announced that Murthy would co-chair his Covid-19 Advisory Council, along with former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A Kessler and Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of public health at Yale. On December 7, Biden announced that Murthy would be his nominee for the Surgeon General of the United States.
After his selection as the new surgeon general, Murthy said: “I never dreamed that I would have the honor of serving as a general surgeon again. In this time of crisis, I am grateful for the opportunity to help end this pandemic, be a voice for science, and support our nation on its path to rebuilding and healing. “
“The best doctor is not an authority figure who writes prescriptions, but rather a partner in healing, someone who sees patients in all their humanity and empowers them to take charge of their health. That is what I will always strive to be as an American physician, ”he said.
Murthy resides in Washington, DC with his wife, Alice Chen, also a physician, and their two young children.
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