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Biden taps Vivek Murthy to co-chair Covid-19 team: Report
Biden will issue a string of executive orders reversing some of President Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions, a report said. He will return the US to the Paris Accord, remove the travel ban on people from some Muslim-majority countries, resume funding for WHO and reinstate protections for undocumented immigrants brought as children.
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Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy will co-chair a Coronavirus task force that President-elect Joe Biden will announce on Monday as his first major step towards combating the pandemic, his top campaign promise.
After his inauguration on January 20, Biden will issue a string of executive orders reversing some of President Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions. He will return the US to the Paris Accord, remove the travel ban on people from some Muslim-majority countries, resume funding for WHO and reinstate protections for undocumented immigrants brought as children, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Murthy, an Indian American, will co-chair the task force with David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner and Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale University professor. The team will have 12 members.
The president-elect spoke briefly about this team in his victory speech Saturday. “On Monday, I will name a group of leading scientists and experts as Transition Advisors to help take the Biden-Harris Covid plan and convert it into an action blueprint that starts on January 20th, 2021,” he said.
“That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern.”
The president-elect gave no further details, but multiple news reports named Murthy as co-chair.
Biden ran his presidential campaign on the promise of tacking the epidemic as his top priority and accused Trump of failing to respond adequately to the crisis and not being transparent about its severity.
More than 237,000 Americans have been killed and 9 million have been infected and new cases have been surging again.
Murthy had been advising Biden for months on Covid-19; once every week, according to some accounts, that gave rise to speculation about a possible berth for the Indian American physician who shot to fame as President Barack Obama’s Surgeon General.
He was the 19th Surgeon General of the United States — also called America’s Doctor — from December 15, 2014 to April 21, 2017
Many Indian Americans hope to land somewhere in a Biden administration, and there is even a list of names put together of potential appointees by Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Victory Fund, a group of Democrats who promote AAPI candidates and political effort.
It gave the list to the Biden transition team chair Ted Kaufman in September. It contained “dozens” of names, including “many Indian Americans”. But the group has been tight-lipped about names and numbers.
Every incoming administration is expected to fill some 4.000 federal positions with political appointees, from members of the cabinet to senior positions in state, defence and other departments.
