But as he walked into the White House briefing room, Jha harbored few of those concerns.
“I don’t think we have any expectations for any other symptoms at this point,” he said Thursday, just hours after Biden tested positive. “He is undergoing treatment. He has mild symptoms. He feels good.
The bullish valuation of that day would soon seem prescient, as Biden’s health has improved and he is one step closer to coming out of solitary confinement. For Jha, this has been a welcome shift into the spotlight. For the White House, it looks like something it hasn’t experienced much recently: a plan that went off without a hitch.
Biden’s mild case gave Jha the high-profile example he needed to reassure the public that the vaccines and treatments driving the pandemic response are key to preventing serious disease. It is a timely reinforcement of the government’s recall campaign. Even more remarkable, Jha argued, is the validation of the White House’s view that Americans should get used to living with Covid — and give Biden far more credit than they can in a relative security.
“Although we have a very contagious variant, thanks to the leadership of the president, we have the capacity to manage this,” Jha said at a press conference on Friday. “This virus is going to be with us forever.”
The passage through the briefing room was not smooth, including scrutiny of the White House’s refusal to provide access to Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor. Jha has repeatedly refused to offer a direct answer as to why he, and not O’Connor, was there, although three people familiar with the matter said he was chosen in part because his aides thought he would be a more disciplined messenger.
But for White House aides struggling to juggle a series of health crises, Jha’s performance served as validation for why they hired him in the first place. A recognized public health communicator with an optimistic streak, the 51-year-old doctor and academic ignored Beltway’s gloom surrounding the Covid response, trying instead to focus voters on the administration’s successes in dealing with the crisis.
“They’re trying to learn a lesson from the president’s Covid case,” said Andy Slavitt, a former senior adviser to the White House Covid response team. “They want to make the public understand the best ways to deal with it when you’re infected.”
Jha has delivered that optimistic message relentlessly in his first three months on the job, even as fears mount that key elements of the fight against the pandemic are no longer going the way of the White House.
Within the administration, some officials privately complain that Jha has struggled to use the bureaucratic levers essential to his job description as response coordinator.
The administration still needs billions more dollars from Congress to sustain its Covid response beyond the end of the year — a stalemate that Jha, despite good relations with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, n was unable to get out. Increasingly contagious subvariants drive up hospitalizations and deaths after a lull.
The result, according to these officials, is an operation that has moved away primarily from carrying out concrete initiatives and towards managing the optics of a pandemic that may be less deadly, but which remains uncontained.
“Ashish is the TV doc,” a senior Biden official said. ” That’s what he does. It’s his job.
In a statement, a White House spokesperson said Jha had sought to highlight “the work we have done to ensure that all Americans – not just the president – have easy access” to vaccines and treatments.
“He is also able to share the message that even though COVID is not over and BA.5 means more infections, we can minimize its impact on daily life by boosting ourselves, taking precautions to common sense and using treatments if we get sick,” the spokesperson said. said.
Jha replaced Jeff Zients, the more operations-focused Covid czar, in April. It was a move that signaled the White House’s broader desire to get out of crisis-response mode and adopt a normalized approach to handling the virus. Since then, officials have increasingly relied on Jha as the primary messenger for a wider range of health issues facing the administration.
Indeed, by the end of the week, Jha had also played a visible role in the Biden administration’s response to the monkeypox outbreak – insisting on TV and in the briefing room that the government could still contain and eliminate the disease, even as cases surge and vaccine and testing shortages persist.
The decision to bolster Jha’s role in monkeypox messaging has sparked anxiety among his advisers, some of whom have advised him against getting involved in what a person familiar with the matter described as a “shitshow” of a situation over which he had no direct control.
“Overall we had substandard performance on monkeypox,” said another person knowledgeable on the matter. “There is a lot of concern everywhere.”
Primary responsibility for managing the outbreak rests with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there is growing frustration with Biden’s health department over his slow attempt to bring the disease under control more than two months since he arrived in the country. Currently, there are nearly 4,000 recorded cases in the United States — the most of any country — and some public health experts believe the administration has already missed its window to contain the outbreak.
Representatives from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services called the response to monkeypox a team effort to stop its spread in the United States. They said public communications were led by a range of senior officials.
Jha, however, has agreed to step up his involvement over the past few days. And while the White House plans to eventually bring in a separate coordinator to lead the monkeypox response, some people involved in the planning have suggested that Jha could still play an important role in managing the effort’s public communications.
This willingness to put himself in the spotlight has won Jha praise among top aides and increased his influence in an administration already blessed with top health communicators like Anthony Fauci and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
Importantly, officials said, Jha has so far maintained credibility with Democrats and Republicans alike. And with his vast expertise in global health, he is one of the few Biden officials who can reach people from all walks of life on a range of public health issues.
Yet for others more focused on the Covid response, there is a lingering concern that Jha’s growing workload has come as the pandemic has become more of a threat – not less.
Fueled by the BA.5 subvariant, Covid hospitalizations and deaths have risen steadily over the past month. Beyond a new media blitz led by Jha to encourage people to get vaccinated, the administration has reported few new ideas to get ahead of the virus.
And while Biden offered a case study of his administration’s progress against the pandemic, the thousands of far more serious infections every day represent an ever-present sign of how much work remains for Jha’s team.
“He’s supposed to coordinate the country’s Covid response,” an adviser said, adding that while Jha’s job is mostly limited to talking about containing the pandemic, “you end up breaking the news.” You have just become the press secretary.
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