Indian Americans on Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team

Focusing on building an administration that “looks like America”, President-elect Joe Biden has put together a transition team of over 500 people that reflects America’s diversity and priorities. The most significant is the prominent presence of Americans of Indian descent on the team. Nearly two dozen of them have been tapped to play key roles in tackling the country’s immediate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic.

After months of mismanagement and denial starting at the top, America now has more than 10 million cases and 2,41,000 deaths.

Joe Biden had made it clear that tackling covid-19 would be his adminstratio’s first task, and an advisory board is already in place. Three of the board’s 13 members are Indian Americans.

Biden has chosen Dr Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general in the Obama administration, as one of the board’s three co-chairs. Atul Gawande and Celine Gounder, both of whom are proficient in the field of medical field and journalism, have been appointed advisors.

Murthy (43) was born in Yorkshire, England, to immigrants from Karnataka. His parents moved to Miami when he was three. A stellar academic career followed — he is an alum of both Harvard and Yale — and his 2014 appointment as surgeon general, a man in charge of nearly 7,000 federal medical workers, was welcomed in chorus by the medical community.

Murthy had treated thousands of gunshot wounds as a doctor and felt strongly about the menace of gun violence. The National Rifle Association and senate Republicans held up his confirmation for nearly a year because of his views.

He was eventually confirmed, but Donald Trump suddenly woke up to the fact that Murthy was an Obama appointee and sacked him summarily in 2017. No reason given.

A surgeon by training, Gawande, 55, is widely known for his authoritative and lucid writing on medicine. He is the son of immigrant parents from Maharashtra and Gujarat, born in Brooklyn, educated at Oxford and Stanford.

He wrote a book in 2014, Being Mortal- it talks about care of the aged . A particularly vulnerable section of the population in the times of COVID.

Celine Gounder’s father is from Tamil Nadu, while her mother is from France. But her American identity is shaped by her work on infectious diseases and her ability to talk about health in a manner that people understand through her writing and films. In 2017, People magazine named Gounder one of ’25 Women Changing the World.’