Dr. Ashish Jha, a familiar face during COVID pandemic, stepping down as Brown’s public health dean
By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current
Jha will step down at the end of December to spearhead “an initiative that aims to bolster the nation’s defenses against emerging pandemic and biological threats,” the school announced Thursday. The unnamed initiative will continue the work Jha started in April 2022 as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.
But that was all the information available Thursday about Jha’s new venture.
“At this time there are no additional details to be shared on what he is doing next,” Rob Hancock, a spokesperson for the School of Public Health, said in an email.
Jha said in emailed comments Thursday evening that his new venture will be informed by his time at Brown and as a face of the federal response to COVID — experiences which taught him how to communicate public health challenges to non-scientists.
“That starts with recognizing that communication is a two-way street,” Jha said. “It’s easy to think about what we want to say but it’s more important to understand what questions people have and how we can meet their needs with clear, reliable information.”
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jha was among the most public-facing health experts. Jha told STAT News in 2021 that at his busiest, he was making between 10 and 12 TV appearances a day, which amounted to thousands of appearances overall.
Jha took temporary leave from Brown to work at the White House. Jha was the third coronavirus response coordinator, following Jeff Zients, who was also appointed by Biden, and Deborah Birx, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term.
Jha has continued to think about health care in a federal context, especially during the second iteration of the Trump administration. In recent months, Jha has published opinion pieces in the Boston Globe and he continues to write A Moment in Health, a blog on Substack about public health issues. Posts have explored issues like “What Should We Learn from an Anti-Vaccine Conference?” and “The real danger isn’t Tylenol, it’s bad information.”
Jha’s essay on the latter was meant to counter U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments linking over-the-counter pain relievers to autism. Jha joined the chorus of scientists and medical professionals who discredited Kennedy’s comments, and added that Kennedy’s “insinuation” was “false and profoundly cruel.”
In another piece he criticized Kennedy for “openly and consistently disregard[ing] scientific evidence.”
The pandemic’s successes in public policy, Jha wrote, “came from effectively and respectfully pursuing the scientific process.”
“Even the pandemic’s most controversial policy — vaccine mandates — was reasonable in April 2021, when health experts believed that vaccination would prevent most infections and transmission, but certainly did not make sense by April 2023, when we knew that vaccinations had only a modest impact on transmission,” Jha wrote.
Still, Jha remains an advocate for vaccines as a necessary instrument for public health, especially mRNA vaccines, which he described in an August essay as “the technology best positioned to defend its people against future biological threats.”
Jha’s new gig comes amid changes in national Health and Human Services policy initiatives under Kennedy, changes that often directly contrast Jha’s own public assertions about health policy. The most recent example is an attempt to tweak hepatitis vaccine guidance for infants by rolling back universal shots for newborns. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee meeting Thursday to decide whether to change the guidance postponed the vote until Friday.
Kennedy’s office has also tried to limit COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and mRNA vaccine development by cancelling contracts and solicitations.
Contemporaneous with Jha’s pandemic experience was his five-year tenure at Brown. Jha arrived right around the same time that COVID hit, and in the subsequent years, Jha oversaw growth in enrollment and the launch of a new School of Public Health space in Providence plus a satellite location in Washington, D.C.
“His legacy at Brown will be his cultivation of high-impact initiatives that improve the health and lives of millions of people around the world,” Brown President Christina H. Paxson said in a statement Thursday. “We have strengthened our reputation for leveraging data and science to develop solutions to complex public health challenges.”
Graduate student enrollment at the School of Public Health has more than doubled since 2020 under Jha’s tenure, according to Brown.
Dr. Francesca L. Beaudoin, a professor of epidemiology and emergency medicine, will serve as the public health school’s interim dean starting Jan. 1, according to Brown. The School of Public Health includes 150 faculty, 800 graduate and undergrad students, and 13 research centers. It receives about $90 million in outside funding annually.
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