From the Hospital to the White House: A Conversation with Dr. Ashish Jha
By Hannah Laibinis (SFS'24)
On January 30, 2024, our Conversations in Health: Global to Local class had the opportunity to speak with Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator.
As the child of immigrant parents, Dr. Jha attended medical school out of a moral obligation to fulfill his parents’ wishes to have a son who was a doctor. He shared that in medical school, he recognized that “moving people's lives in the right direction really required a much broader set of thinking than what [he] could do from a clinic or from a hospital.” He has since combined his passion for human rights and policy with his clinical practice skills to become an influential advocate for quality, affordable health care and better-equipped pandemic preparedness.
A well-respected scholar, Dr. Jha spent the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic critically analyzing the White House’s response. In March 2022, he was called upon to serve as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, now responsible for creating and revising the policies he had once critiqued.
In his reflections on being a member of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, Dr. Jha recognized the difficulty in achieving all the goals of his policy agenda. Regardless of the scientific evidence backing his policy recommendations to President Biden, his suggestions could be overruled by the direction of the administration. His goal as the COVID-19 response coordinator to better manage the effects of COVID-19 did not always perfectly align with the administration’s goal to better run the country.
Throughout the pandemic, Dr. Jha frequently made appearances on national news networks. He sought to tailor his presentations so that his mother, a public school teacher in New York City for 25 years with zero background in medicine or public health, could understand his language. Dr. Jha explained his strategy of speaking plainly and avoiding jargon, while still maintaining a level of respect and avoiding condescension when talking to the audience.
In addition to more liberal media broadcasts who shared similar perspectives regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Jha also frequented conservative news broadcasts, including Newsmax. Though not changing his overall messaging as a communicator, Dr. Jha sought to tailor his language to ideas that this audience could relate to, such as the responsibility to communities, the idea of being American, and personalizing the issue as a father rather than a scientist and academic.
Dr. Jha’s professional journey began with the personal moral obligation he felt to his parents to become a clinician, but it quickly became the space where he combined his technical knowledge with his passions of service, human rights, and a goal to “change the world.” Dr. Jha’s story reminds us of the multitude of possible ways to make a positive influence on the world, but that we each have our own interests, specialties, and passions that should be pursued.
Hannah Laibinis (SFS'24) is an undergraduate student in the School of Foreign Service majoring in science, technology, and international affairs and minoring in statistics and Mandarin Chinese. She is a student in the Conversations in Health: Global to Local course.