Biden Names Two Latinos To His Covid Task Force As His Team Grows
President Donald Trump has refused to concede the 2020 election but that hasn’t stopped President-elect Joe Biden. The soon-to-be 46th president of the United States is already building his teams, including his Covid-19 task force. Included are two major Latino physicians and health experts Dr. Robert Rodriguez and Dr. Luciana Borio.
President-elect Joe Biden has announced his Covid-19 task force.
President-elect Joe Biden is getting to work to assemble a team to tackle the unrelenting Covid-19 crisis in the U.S. The current crisis has been exacerbated by a lack of action from the current administration. As President Trump plans a series of legal battle hoping to overturn the election results, President-elect Biden is appealing to the American people.
In his first address to the American people as president-elect, Biden asked Americans to wear masks to bring the virus under control. The most important part was when President-elect Biden told the American people not to see the mask as a political statement.
“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day. It doesn’t matter your party or your point of view,” Biden said in his address. “We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months.”
President-elect Biden has tapped two Latino doctors to join his Covid-19 task force.
President Trump’s current Covid-19 task force has done little to control the virus. Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the task force, has gone on record lying that the pandemic was under control. He even went so far as to say that there is no second wave and that the media was overhyping the virus that has infected more than 10 million Americans and killed more than 240,000.
Dr. Robert Rodriguez, a professor at UCSF’s School of Medicine is part of the task force.
Dr. Rodriguez is originally from Texas and he left California to volunteer in his home state. The doctor went to Brownsville, Texas to help fight the deadly and terrifying surge in Covid cases in the state. He considers it the hardest work he has done in his life.
“I flew down there, and the next day I was in the ICU treating the sickest patients that I had ever seen in my career. The doctors and nurses, respiratory therapists were working extremely hard, but they were simply overwhelmed with the number of cases,” Dr. Rodriguez told NBC News. “At the time, we had about five times the number of cases in the ICU there as compared to my hospital [in San Francisco], which was a much bigger hospital and a much better-resourced hospital.”
Dr. Luciana Borio is back to work for the public health of the American people.
Dr. Borio was part of the pandemic response team that President Trump disbanded in 2018. Many have criticized this decision by President Trump as the reason the virus has been as devastating as it was in the U.S. The disbanding of the pandemic response team left the U.S. vulnerable for this kind of preventable tragedy.
Dr. Borio has a long history of helping the U.S. combating widespread viral infections. She was part of the team that fought to against the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic, the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the 2015-16 Zika outbreak in Latin America.
