Biden’s Covid task force to play key role in pandemic effort

Bloomberg

President-elect Joe Biden announced a new coronavirus task force as his transition team seeks to fulfill a campaign promise to develop a dramatically different approach than President Donald Trump’s to contain the pandemic.
The 13-member task force is composed largely of doctors and public health experts, who will work with Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and the transition team to map out the public health and economic policies needed to curtail the virus.
The task force was announced only hours before positive preliminary test results were released of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE indicating it prevented more than 90% of infections. The study involved tens of thousands of volunteers.
Eight months into the worst pandemic in a century, the preliminary results pave the way for the companies to seek an emergency-use authorisation from regulators if further research shows the shot is also safe.
From the onset of the pandemic, Biden said it was critical to listen to scientists and medical experts in charting a path out of the pandemic. He staked much of his presidential campaign on striking a contrast with Trump, who repeatedly downplayed the dangers of the virus even after being hospitalised when he contracted it.
The team will be led by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, and Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of public health at Yale University. It will include about a dozen people, many of whom were already advising Biden and his staff throughout the campaign. Kessler and Murthy, in particular, were deeply involved in shaping the Biden campaign’s plans for responding to the virus, and they both regularly briefed the president-elect.
The task force was expected to brief Biden and Harris on Monday. The transition and the task force face the difficult
task of figuring out how to implement the policies Biden
has proposed, including identifying supply chain issues for vaccine distribution and increased testing.
The announcement of the task force is the first step Biden and his team are taking to demonstrate the high value they will place in having experts and doctors guide their response.