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Rebuilding the United States' Covid-19 response from amid the wreckage of the Donald Trump administration's slash-and-burn strategy over the last nine months is uppermost on President-elect Joe Biden and deputy Kamala Harris' to-do list.
Last week, the pair named a Covid Task Force, which will be co-chaired by former United States Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy (right), who is of Indian origin.
The other co-chairs are former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Yale professor Marcella Nunez-Smith.
The team includes Indian-American doctor and author Atul Gawande, who had directed a healthcare task force committee in President Bill Clinton's administration.
With Covid-19 devastating the US by infecting more than 11.4 million people and claiming 248,000 lives, Dr Murthy, 43, will play a key role in Mr Biden's administration as his key adviser. The Biden-Harris team will be inaugurated on Jan 20.
Dr Murthy said on Tuesday that one of the most immediate things to do is to reduce the spread. "The way you do that is by communicating honestly, by leading with science and scientists in the face of this pandemic and ultimately by delivering results," he said.
"If we just lock down the entire country without targeting our efforts, then we are going to exacerbate the pandemic fatigue people are feeling, you're going to hurt jobs and the economy, you're going to shut down schools and hurt the education of our children.
"So, we've got to approach this with the precision of a scalpel rather than the blunt force of an axe."
During Mr Biden's presidential campaign, Dr Murthy emerged as one of his top advisers on public health and Covid-19 issues. In May, he and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal were appointed co-chairs of the Healthcare Task Force by the Biden campaign.
For Dr Murthy, the return to the White House will be especially sweet. He was asked to resign by Mr Trump as the US' Surgeon-General in April 2017, although he was named to a four-year term by former President Barack Obama starting in December 2014.
Democratic senator Chris Murphy had then said that Dr Murthy was a "political target". With the rank of Vice-Admiral, Mr Murthy was the highest ranking official of Indian origin in Mr Obama's second term and played an active role in formulating and implementing the Obamacare Affordable Care Act.
The author of the New York Times bestseller "Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World" also helped produce a report on how climate change has brought about a public health crisis.
"Our nation has what it absolutely takes to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic," Dr Murthy said at the Democratic National Convention in August while supporting Mr Biden's candidature. "We have the talent, resources and the technology, what we are missing is leadership.
"We need a leader who inspires us... I know Joe Biden can be that leader."
Dr Murthy added that he has seen how Mr Biden "poured himself in Covid briefings" and appreciated his support for immigrants.
Talking about his own family, Dr Murthy said: "Six years ago, when Joe Biden met my family, many of them immigrants awed to be in the nation's capital, I saw how he kneeled beside my grandmother's wheelchair, took her hands in his and said: 'Thank you for choosing us, the United States of America, as the place to trust for your family.'"
Dr Murthy, whose family hails from Karnataka in India, received his Bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and pursued MD and MBA from Yale University.
He completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and later joined the Harvard Medical School as a faculty member in internal medicine.
People in Hallagere, a nondescript village in Karnataka's Mandya district, were elated when Dr Murthy was appointed to the Covid Task Force.
"Vivek Murthy's family, including his father H.N. Lakshminarasimha Murthy and mother Myetraie, belong to Hallagere," said a district officer. "Vivek's parents migrated to Britain and subsequently to the US, where his father is also a doctor in Miami."
Mandya is about 100km from Bengaluru. According to local media reports, Dr Murthy's grandfather H.T. Narayana Shetty was a director at Mysore Sugar company in Mandya.
Dr Murthy was born in Huddersfield, a town in England's West Yorkshire where his father worked after he migrated from Mysuru decades ago.
"The Murthys have donated computers to state-run schools at Hallagere and conducted health camps during their visits to the village through the family's Society of Children of Planet Earth Foundation," said the Mandya official.
Indo-Asian News Service
"My family was never supposed to have left our ancestral village. My father is the son of a farmer. He was supposed to have been a farmer, as was I. But for my grandfather's insistence that his son get an education - even if that meant going into debt - we might have never left that village to go out into the world."
- Dr Vivek Murthy
