A Bihar, India-born global health expert has been appointed by President Joe Biden to the White House position of overseeing the nation's response to the Covid pandemic.

“I am excited to name Dr Ashish Jha as the new White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator”, Biden said on Thursday announcing the appointment.

“Dr Jha is one of the leading public health experts in America, and a well-known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence”, he said.

Jha, who is the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, is one of the most popular experts that the media reaches out to for explaining the Covid pandemic and the efforts to control it.

He will be joining three Indian Americans - Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, National Drug Control Policy Director Rahul Gupta, and Center for Medicare Director Meena Seshamani - at the higher echelons of US health care system.

Jha tweeted, “For all the progress we’ve made in this pandemic (and there is a lot). We still have important work to do to protect Americans’ lives and well being. So when @POTUS asked me to serve, I was honoured to have the opportunity”.

Jha was born in Pursaulia, in Madhubani district in Bihar, in 1970 to parents who were educators.

The family moved to Canada in 1979 and to the US in 1983.

He did his BA in economics at Columbia University and switching to medicine, he got his MD and master's in public health from Harvard University. 

He came to Brown from Harvard, where he was the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and the dean for Global Strategy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He had also served as the co-chair of the Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, which examined the failure of the international community's response to the disease.

Even while he was heading the Brown University's School of Public Health, he continued to practice medicine at a hospital for ex-military members.

During the Covid pandemic, he made frequent appearances on TV, wrote op-eds for leading newspapers and was often quoted by reporters.

The medical news website STAT called him “network TV's everyman expert on Covid” with the qualities of a “telegenic phenom” and a “great communicator”.

About 80,O00 Indian American doctors, represented by the powerful American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI), are at the forefront of the healthcare system in America and are highly regarded for their skills and empathy.

(SAM)