New Biden Covid Chief Is Just What the Doctor Ordered

New Biden Covid Chief Is Just What the Doctor Ordered

Dr. Ashish Jha is an eloquent health-policy expert in an administration that’s stronger on management than communications and fresh ideas.

By Jonathan Bernstein

March 18, 2022, 8:30 PM GMT+9

It won’t be easy.

Photographer: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

March 18, 2022, 8:30 PM GMT+9

White House pandemic coordinator Jeff Zients is leaving and being replaced by Dr. Ashish Jha, a very public — and, as far as I can tell, very good — public health expert. In any other White House, I’d be questioning the choice of Jha and whether his undoubted medical and policy expertise and formidable explanatory gifts give him the correct credentials for the job. But in this case, I suspect it’s a good selection.

To me, the quintessential story of President Joe Biden’s fight against the coronavirus was the program to give every household free testing kits. It seemed to be a stellar example of implementation. The tests were easy to order and delivery was generally rapid. But the program didn’t begin until mid-January, right about at the peak of the omicron wave and after the delta wave had done a lot of damage. At that point, manufacturers had cut back on testing and people couldn’t find tests. That is, the administration had appeared to be taken by surprise by the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic, and not for the first time.

In other words, the management prowess that Zients brought to the job has been the administration’s strength. People take the logistics of vaccine distribution for granted now, but the first few weeks of rolling it out featured numerous snafus and difficulties before Biden’s team entered the White House. All of that disappeared rapidly after Chief of Staff Ron Klain and Zients took over, and it hasn’t been a news story since. We haven’t heard much about interagency bickering, either. Carrying out policy has been about as smooth as anyone could hope.

But the policy choices haven’t always received equally strong reviews from public health experts. And the communications side of policy implementation hasn’t been as smooth as the logistics. It’s not entirely the administration’s fault that many people failed to get vaccinated (and even more failed to get the essential booster shot when that became necessary), but the message didn’t get out as effectively as it could have.

To be sure: Drawing lines from policy to implementation to outcomes is difficult. It’s easy to criticize a lot of Donald Trump’s actions when he was president — he denied that the pandemic was a problem for crucial weeks early on, and seemed to give up on everything but the push for vaccines after a short period of taking it seriously — but it’s not really clear how much damage that did. (State policies are similarly difficult to assess. It is clear that states governed by Democrats have generally fared better than those governed by Republicans, but it’s a lot harder to be certain that their policies are what made the difference, and if so which specific policies).

There’s a good argument now that what the administration needs is better policy ideas and better communications, and that it has a good handle on logistics, coordination within the government, and coordination between the federal government and its private and public partners. Perhaps that means that the skills Zients brought to the administration aren’t as important as the subject-matter know-how that Jha seems best qualified to contribute. Especially given that Klain is still around, and the administration overall has been pretty stable. 

I agree with Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that there’s a lot on the line here for the president — not to mention for the nation. What’s going to matter politically for the midterm elections and eventually for the 2024 presidential contest will be outcomes, and people will hold Biden and the Democrats responsible. They’ll do so regardless of what they think of Biden’s policy choices, or whatever Republicans advocate.

That doesn’t mean that Biden, Jha and the Democrats should ignore immediate voter preferences. That has to be part of the equation. But my guess is that what works to limit the spread of the pandemic is more important in the medium and long term than anyone’s immediate reaction to any particular measure. And that what’s expressed as antagonism towards actions to control the virus, like mask and vaccine mandates, are really eruptions of frustration with a pandemic that’s inflicted two years of disruption.

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Not that managing a fast-spreading and deadly new disease is easy. A lot of the policy choices that have worked out poorly have been understandable, and both the virus and public opinion — and, really, human nature —  have given both the Trump and Biden administrations tough choices to make and weighty tasks to accomplish. Analysts should take that into account when assessing how Biden, Klain and Zients have done. But voters won’t. They’ll just care about outcomes.