For the past two years, as the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on American lives and the world at large, Dr Ashish K. Jha has been there to make sense of it all. He has been hard to miss.

You could find him on MSNBC, before vaccines arrived, bluntly acknowledging that “it’s hard to overemphasize how bad things are”. Or on CNN, upbraiding maskless lawmakers for spreading Covid-19, or Fox News, proclaiming remote schooling “a disaster”. The Museum of Science in Boston went so far as to create a hologram of Dr Jha last year, using artificial intelligence and sound clips, to answer coronavirus questions.

Now Dr Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, a respected academic and a practising internist with minimal government experience, is about to join the White House as President Joe Biden’s new coronavirus response coordinator. Dr Jha, a preternaturally calm 51-year-old whom the health news site Stat once described as “network TV’s Everyman expert on Covid”, is going to take charge of the most complicated federal response to a crisis in modern history.

While his communication skills will help, there is much more to the job than talking to the public. It requires coordinating across government agencies and the private sector, from the Food and Drug Administration, which considers which drugs and vaccines to approve, and the state department, which works to get vaccines overseas, to drugmakers and pharmacies.

“Probably his biggest challenge is that he doesn’t know government, he doesn’t have experience, and it does take a while to know who you should call, who you can’t and how you get through the hierarchy,” said Dr Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s top medical adviser for the pandemic, who will work closely with Dr Jha. “But he’s a smart guy. He’ll figure it out.”

With the supply and logistics infrastructure now in place, Dr Jha will face different challenges. Virus cases are rising in parts of Europe and Asia, and most experts, including Dr Fauci, believe the numbers will rise again in the US. Yet many Americans do not want to think about the pandemic anymore. Mask mandates have lifted all over the country.

Dr Jha may also get caught up in a bitter funding battle between the White House and Congress, where the administration’s request for $22.5 billion in emergency coronavirus relief aid is stalled. If no agreement is reached by the time he takes office in April, the government will be out of money to buy more therapeutics and vaccines.

With his gentle manner and professorial glasses, Dr Jha has often been a soothing figure on television. He speaks in plain, easy-to-understand language, assuming that ordinary people “don’t want to hear a debate about the R-naught”, he told Stat, referring to a way to measure the transmissibility of a virus. They do, he said “want to hear what the new variants mean to them, when their kids might be eligible for a vaccine”.

With that in mind, Dr Jha could help solve what has been one of the administration’s biggest failings: its confusing messaging, which stems partly from a lack of coordination between agencies.

So far at least, Dr Jha has been able to reach people across the political spectrum. He makes it a point to appear on conservative channels and is a regular guest on Newsmax, a favourite of former President Donald J. Trump.Public health experts are hopeful that Dr Jha will be well positioned to tone down the divisiveness.

But Dr Jha is already drawing criticism from some public health experts who believe that he has been too cosy with the Biden administration and has often echoed White House talking points.

Dr Jha was born in Bihar. When he was nine, his parents moved their family to Toronto. He showed up, he told The Providence Journal in an interview last year, “not speaking a word of English”.

(New York Times News Service)