WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — This week, President Joe Biden named Brown University School of Public Health dean and ardent vaccine passport advocate Dr. Ashish Jha as the new White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator.
“Dr. Jha is one of the leading public health experts in America, and a well known figure to many Americans from his wise and calming public presence,” Biden said Thursday, announcing that Jha would replace outgoing response coordinator Jeff Zients. “And as we enter a new moment in the pandemic — executing on my National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan and managing the ongoing risks from COVID — Dr. Jha is the perfect person for the job.”
“Throughout this pandemic, we have worked at Brown to improve public understanding and information, and inform policy at every level of government here and around the globe,” Jha said. “I am honored to accept President Biden’s invitation to serve and continue that work. I do so confident that the work of the Brown School of Public Health will advance around critical issues including pandemic preparedness and key initiatives we have launched and are growing, to improve understanding and policy in key public health issues, and train the next generation of public health leaders.”
A review of Jha’s past public statements on COVID, however, suggests he will be every bit as radical as previous top Biden advisers on the pandemic, at a time when Democrats outside the White House are increasingly recognizing the political necessity of distancing themselves from COVID restrictions.
The National Pulse has identified numerous such statements, starting with an April 2021 op-ed in which he argued for making restoration of “everyone’s full participation in society” contingent on “vaccine certificates,” dismissing concerns about the implications for personal freedom as “nonsense.” For support, he favorably cited the example of Israel’s Green Pass, the effectiveness of which has since been panned, leading to its removal as of this March.
In October 2021, Jha endorsed vaccine mandates for air travel, citing an anecdote about sitting on a plane next to a partially-masked passenger who was less-than receptive to his unsolicited requests to pull her mask over her nose:
Last night I took an overnight from LAX to Boston
I got to the gate, found myself next to a person whose mask barely covered her mouth
Mask was nowhere near her nose let alone covering it
I walked away
My flight boarded and I sat down in a window seat
She soon sat next to me
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) October 4, 2021
Flight attendant asked her to pull up her mask
She did
She chatted with me about having seen me on TV
She then volunteered she wasn't going to get the vaccine
I tried to engage her on why
Her mask fell below her nose again
We kept chatting for a bit
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) October 4, 2021
I don't love sitting next to an unvaccinated, unmasked person for hours
Why do I care?
I'd rather not get a breakthrough infection
So I sat in my KF94, likely safe
She was in the middle seat
Her neighbor in the aisle seat was an older man with a cloth mask. Not great
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) October 4, 2021
But vaccine mandates for air travel are
Canada has done it
We should too. Mandate vaccine or negative test for air travel
I understand the person next to me had the freedom not to be vaccinated
The old man next to her has the right to fly without getting infected
End
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) October 4, 2021
As left-wing figures advocate increasing COVID vaccination through coercion, they tend not to be interested in addressing the serious reservations many Americans harbor as to the COVID vaccines’ safety, stemming in large part from the rushed nature of their creation. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative developed and released the shots in a tenth of the time vaccine development usually takes and a quarter of the time it took the previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, yet their advocates have done little to address the concerns of the hesitant.
Most recently it was reported that 11,289 cases of pericarditis/myocarditis after COVID vaccination were reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) system between January 1 and February 25 of this year, which is already 47% of the 24,177 reports for the same submitted in all of 2021.
Defenders of the relatively-new shots claim that VAERS offers an exaggerated view of a vaccines’ potential risks, as anyone can submit a report without vetting it. But U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have acknowledged the “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “underreporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of underreporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).
Last year, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such underreporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under the auspices of the HHS’s Indian Health Service program, in which multiplied medical professionals attest to seeing adverse reactions far more frequently than the impression given by the mainstream media.
In the footage, emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”
In May 2021, NBC News published a report acknowledging experts’ concerns about “gaps” in federal monitoring of the COVID vaccines. While the government currently relies on a “hodgepodge” of sources for safety data, the report explained, the quoted experts call for a more “robust ‘active’ surveillance system [that] can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”
Additional evidence against the shots’ safety was unearthed in late February during a COVID-19 vaccine hearing held by US Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), where attorney Thomas Renz presented medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, 487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Like many left-wing figures, Jha’s preferred COVID response appears to make exceptions for causes aligned with his politics. In June 2020, as lockdowns were ongoing throughout much of the country, he wrote that the Black Lives Matter protests of that summer “aren’t as dangerous for spreading coronavirus as you might think,” invoking the since-debunked benefits of masks and claiming that “there is a serious risk and grave public health cost to not addressing systemic racism against black people in America.”