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jeff zients
Podesta Tapped to Replace Kerry as Biden's Top Climate Official
"Podesta needs to take the baton from Kerry and lead the U.S. on a furious sprint to end oil and gas expansion while we still have time to prevent the worst climate catastrophes," said one campaigner.
Jan 31, 2024
Senior White House adviser John Podesta has been tapped to replace outgoing U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
According to the Post, Podesta—who is currently in charge of implementing the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—will have the title of "senior adviser to the president for international climate policy" and will work out of the White House instead of the State Department, where Kerry was based.
"We need to keep meeting the gravity of this moment, and there is no one better than John Podesta to make sure we do," White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said in a statement. "John has—and will continue to be—at the helm of driving the implementation of the most significant climate law in history."
NBC News reported that Kerry—a former secretary of state and the 2004 Democratic nominee for president—will shift to supporting President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
In a statement, Center for Biological Diversity’s Energy Justice program director Jean Su underscored the imperative of building on the limited yet important climate progress achieved by the Biden administration.
"The recent pause on gas exports has positioned Podesta to lead the fossil fuel phaseout and the clean energy expansion we desperately need," Su said. "In his final act as climate envoy, John Kerry agreed to a global transition away from fossil fuels and urged a far more ambitious scale and timeline."
"Podesta needs to take the baton from Kerry and lead the U.S. on a furious sprint to end oil and gas expansion while we still have time to prevent the worst climate catastrophes," she added.
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'Catastrophic Decision': Progressives Rip Choice of Jeff Zients for Chief of Staff
"Zients as a businessman embodies much of the corporate misconduct the executive branch led by a Democratic Party ought to be cracking down on," said one progressive strategist.
Jan 23, 2023
Reports Sunday that President Joe Biden has chosen Jeff Zients to replace outgoing White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain were met with alarm among progressive watchdogs, who pointed to Zients' disastrous tenure as the administration's coronavirus czar as well as his history in the corporate world—where he built a fortune investing in healthcare companies accused of fraud.
Klain, who developed a solid working relationship with progressives in Congress, is expected to depart shortly after Biden's State of the Union address on February 7.
Revolving Door Project executive director Jeff Hauser called the elevation of Zients to White House chief of staff a "catastrophic decision," saying in a statement that "the Biden administration has been at its best when it has been on the attack against corporate excesses that wide majorities of Americans find abhorrent."
"Americans are appalled by profiteering in healthcare—Jeff Zients has become astonishingly rich by profiteering in healthcare," said Hauser. "Americans are aghast at how social media companies have built monopolies and violated privacy laws—Zients served on the Board of Directors of Facebook as it was defending itself against growing attacks from both political parties."
The Revolving Door Project's Daniel Boguslaw and Max Moran wrote for The American Prospect last year that Zients—who was replaced as Covid-19 response coordinator back in April—has "controlled, invested in, and helped oversee" healthcare companies that "were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud."
"They have also been accused of surprise-billing practices and even medical malpractice," Boguslaw and Moran noted. "Taken together, an examination of the companies that made Zients rich paints a picture of a man who seized on medical providers as a way to capitalize on the suffering of sick Americans. In the end, it seems to have all paid off."
"The most egregious violation is documented in a 2015 Justice Department settlement announcement," they added. "Portfolio Logic—the investment firm Zients founded with his own money—agreed to pay almost $7 million to resolve allegations of fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid billing, involving a subsidiary (Pediatric Services of America Healthcare, or PSA) that it purchased in 2007."
"Hopefully Zients will prove us wrong—but unless that unlikely and fortuitous surprise occurs, Biden will need a quick hook."
Progressives have also been highly critical of Zients' performance in government.
In early 2022, Boguslaw urged the Biden administration to fire Zients over his failure to "provide the materials necessary to improve the U.S. response" to Covid-19 "or the guidance necessary to keep the pandemic under control."
Following news that he would be leaving the coronavirus response post, Public Citizen's Robert Weissman lamented that Zients "refused to pay appropriate attention to global solutions to the global pandemic, because of political concerns or otherwise."
"And the Zients-led Covid response refused to challenge Big Pharma's monopoly control, in the U.S. and globally, over technologies that relied crucially on public support," Weissman continued. "As a result, the United States and other rich countries failed to expand vaccine supply sufficiently to meet global need. Without adequate supply, efforts to bolster low-income country distribution and delivery systems consequently have lagged and been similarly under-resourced."
During his time as pandemic response coordinator, Zients was far and away the wealthiest member of Biden's cabinet, disclosing assets worth at least $89.3 million and as much as $442.8 million.
Citing the Revolving Door Project's work, progressive strategist Murshed Zaheed said Sunday that "Zients as a businessman embodies much of the corporate misconduct the executive branch led by a Democratic Party ought to be cracking down on."
But the Biden White House doesn't appear remotely concerned about Zients' corporate past.
With Biden expected to launch a bid for reelection in the coming weeks, The New York Times reported that "the president could lean on" Zients to "help run the government while other advisers focus on the politics of winning a second term."
Hauser said Sunday that "hopefully Zients will prove us wrong—but unless that unlikely and fortuitous surprise occurs, Biden will need a quick hook."
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'The World Paid the Price': Biden's Outgoing Covid Czar Rebuked Over Failures
"The Zients-led Covid response refused to challenge Big Pharma's monopoly control, in the U.S. and globally, over technologies that relied crucially on public support."
Mar 17, 2022
Progressives on Thursday welcomed the announcement that Jeffrey Zients will step down as White House Covid-19 czar, with the head of a leading consumer advocacy group accusing him of failing the world by refusing to "challenge Big Pharma's monopoly control" over lifesaving vaccines.
"Zients refused to pay appropriate attention to global solutions to the global pandemic, because of political concerns or otherwise."
The New York Times reports Zients, a former corporate executive and director of the National Economic Council, will be replaced next month as White House coronavirus coordinator by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a practicing internist.
Zients has been the target of numerous protests by activists, some of whom called for his termination over his lack of scientific and medical experience, his record as a private equity executive, and his failure to take on Big Pharma during the pandemic.
"Jeff Zients failed and the world paid the price," Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Thursday.
Johanna Kichton of People's Action--whose Justice is Global project staged multiple demonstrations against Zients--said that he:
- Dissuaded governors from issuing mask mandates during the current Covid-19 surge;
- Killed the White House's own [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulation that would have provided paid quarantine and isolation for most U.S. workers;
- Failed to address massive shortages of affordable rapid tests and KN95 [masks]; and
- Led the White House's insufficient approach towards addressing inequitable vaccine access globally by prioritizing corporate handouts and donations.
"All of these policies directly led to the current omicron surge and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and infections, in the U.S. and around the world," said Kichton.
Public Citizen's Weissman said that "despite promises that the U.S. would be a 'vaccine arsenal' for the world, the United States and rich countries refused to share vaccine technology with developing countries and failed to deliver sufficient vaccines."
"The vaccination rate among low-income countries is 14%--about one-sixth the rate in rich nations," he added. "And even those data disguise the extent to which people in poorer countries are receiving less efficacious vaccines."
Weissman continued:
Zients refused to pay appropriate attention to global solutions to the global pandemic, because of political concerns or otherwise. And the Zients-led Covid response refused to challenge Big Pharma's monopoly control, in the U.S. and globally, over technologies that relied crucially on public support. As a result, the United States and other rich countries failed to expand vaccine supply sufficient to meet global need.
"Responsibility for this failure is widely shared among nations, but the United States has a singular leadership role in global health; it has unique capacities and thus responsibilities, and a special duty to lead the world's response," he added. "Under the leadership of Covid coordinator Jeff Zients, the United States failed."
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on Thursday called Jha "an excellent choice" and a "highly qualified public health advocate who will lead with reason and compassion."
Weissman said that Jha "will face major challenges as he takes the helm of the U.S. Covid response, including a misguided perception that the 'pandemic is behind us.'"
"As a seasoned public health expert and advocate, we look to Dr. Jha to lead the White House effort to fight the worldwide pandemic with far more vision and ambition than his predecessor," he added.
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Biden Urged to Fire Covid Response Chief Over 'Damning' Failures
"Zients has failed to provide the materials necessary to improve the U.S. response, or the guidance necessary to keep the pandemic under control," argued one critic.
Jan 16, 2022
President Joe Biden is coming under growing pressure to fire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients--a former private equity executive with no public health background--as the administration continues to face criticism over its slow-moving and inadequate efforts to combat Covid-19.
Watchdog groups have long warned that Zients is not qualified to take on the massive task of leading the federal government's pandemic response given both his lack of scientific and medical experience as well as his record in the private sector, where his firm invested in a company accused of exploitative surprise billing.
"He's proven himself not up to the task, and Biden should relieve him of his duties."
Early critics of Biden's decision to appoint Zients to the key post believe their fears have been realized during the Omicron surge, which has laid bare the administration's failure to prepare for a highly contagious variant that experts warned was all but inevitable.
Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw of the Revolving Door Project (RDP) noted Thursday that "amid an entirely predictable viral mutation and a winter surge, Zients has failed to provide the materials necessary to improve the U.S. response, or the guidance necessary to keep the pandemic under control."
"He's proven himself not up to the task," he added, "and Biden should relieve him of his duties."
Boguslaw, a researcher at RDP--which criticized Biden's selection of Zients in December 2020--argued specifically that the pandemic response czar "has for the most part abdicated" his responsibility to utilize the Defense Production Act to ensure the widespread availability of high-quality masks and coronavirus tests, authority that Biden delegated to Zients.
"He could have spent the year mobilizing against a shared enemy in the virus, stockpiling enough personal protective equipment (PPE) and pharmaceutical products to protect the public," Boguslaw wrote.
But as RDP's Timi Iwayemi observed in an op-ed for Common Dreams last month, "Zients has prioritized cooperation with corporations rather than exercising a democratic government's rights to protect the people."
"Globally," Iwayemi added, "Zients has emphasized vaccine charity over equity, all but ensuring that there will never be enough jabs in arms worldwide to prevent ever more mutations of the fast-changing virus."
Boguslaw echoed that critique, arguing that "most damning among Zients' failures is his refusal to allocate resources to aid vaccination efforts abroad."
"As Vice News reported this week, Tito's Vodka has donated more toward efforts to mass-produce an open-source, global vaccine than the White House," Boguslaw wrote. "Global vaccine distribution is not only a humanitarian requirement, but also a critical step to preventing the development of new variants. But doing so would have required angering powerful forces in corporate America."
Calls for Zients' ouster come amid intensifying outrage at the Biden administration's overall pandemic response--anger that has hardly been limited to Zients.
In recent weeks, as Common Dreams has reported, nurses, union leaders, and public health experts have expressed dismay over confusing and potentially dangerous recommendations emerging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which last month loosened its isolation guidelines following a lobbying push from corporate America.
The administration has also allowed emergency workplace standards to lapse, leaving healthcare workers and others with weaker on-the-job protections as daily coronavirus cases remain at record levels. New figures from Johns Hopkins University show that the seven-day average for newly reported cases in the U.S. topped 800,000 for the first time on Saturday.
In response to surging infections, the Biden administration recently launched a program under which U.S. households will be able to order free rapid coronavirus tests. On Thursday, amid pressure from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressive lawmakers, Biden said the administration will also soon announce a plan to distribute free high-quality masks to people who request them.
While welcoming such steps, experts and observers have lamented the administration's sluggishness in reacting to new pandemic developments, which has left people across the U.S. to fend for themselves while the White House plays catch-up. In October, the Biden administration reportedly rejected a plan to distribute free rapid Covid-19 tests for the holidays, hindering the nation's response to the winter surge in the months that followed.
As recently as early December, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki mocked the idea of mailing coronavirus tests to households.
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People who order tests under the new government program will likely have to wait roughly two weeks for them to arrive. And Biden didn't offer a timeline for the free mask program, which he announced weeks after experts began warning that widely used cloth masks are not sufficient to ward off Omicron.
In a mid-December interview, Vice President Kamala Harris attempted to defend the administration's belated actions by claiming the White House "didn't see Delta coming" and "didn't see Omicron coming."
But former federal vaccine scientist Rick Bright disputed Harris' narrative, writing on Twitter that he personally warned the Biden transition team in December 2020 that "variants were coming and we needed plans and action immediately."
"They all knew," he added.
Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist who also advised the Biden transition, attested that "we absolutely saw variants coming."
Looking ahead, Gounder told the Washington Post on Thursday that "there will be another [variant]--and we might as well learn our lesson and prepare for the next one appropriately."
"Every time, we're sort of like, 'Well, why bother because this is the last surge,'" she said. "And I think that's completely the wrong way to think about it."
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At White House Vigil, Nurses Decry 'Unacceptable' Pandemic Response
"Nurses are enraged that, for our government and our employers, it's all about what's good for business, not what's good for public health."
Jan 14, 2022
Nurses dismayed by the federal government's floundering pandemic response capped off a day of strikes and demonstrations Thursday with a candlelight vigil outside the White House, where healthcare workers gathered to commemorate colleagues who have lost their lives to Covid-19.
"We can't safely care for our patients if we are sick ourselves."
The nurses attending the event, organized by National Nurses United (NNU), set out 481 candles to represent the 481 registered nurses known to have died of Covid-19 in the United States, which has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world. Overall, nearly 5,000 U.S. healthcare workers have died from the coronavirus.
"Unfortunately this is the third event or fourth event that we've had recognizing nurses who have died," said Julia Truelove, a Washington, D.C. nurse and NNU member. "And we chose candles to represent that those were lights in their communities and their families, and those lights have not gone out, but just to remember the good they did in their communities."
"Nurses and healthcare workers across the country have been working incredibly hard," she added. "And to know that our federal government is basing our protections on less than the best is unacceptable. One of the jobs of the government is to protect the public health, and to not have them taking action to do that is demoralizing, and we're desperate."
Candlelight vigil for nurses who died of Covid held outside White House | AFPwww.youtube.com
The vigil came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Biden administration order requiring healthcare workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated against Covid-19. In a significant blow to the administration, the conservative-dominated court also struck down a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers.
While applauding the 5-4 decision on the healthcare facility rules as important, NNU president Zenei Triunfo-Cortez said in a statement that vaccine requirements must be just one part of a comprehensive federal pandemic response as the Omicron strain pushes infections to record levels, overwhelming hospitals and pushing nurses to the brink.
The Supreme Court's ruling on healthcare facilities, said Triunfo-Cortez, "should be a signal to the Department of Labor and Occupational Safety and Health Administration to take the next necessary step--extending the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) issued last June until adopting a permanent standard based on it for healthcare workplaces."
"We need permanent protections based on science and we need them now."
Despite the emergence and rapid spread of Omicron in the U.S., the Labor Department's allowed its ETS to expire last month, leaving healthcare workers with dramatically weakened on-the-job protections.
Earlier this week, NNU applauded nearly 140 members of Congress for demanding that the Labor Department institute a permanent Covid-19 standard for healthcare employees to guarantee adequate and lasting workplace protections.
"It is critical that the federal government ensures that nurses and other healthcare workers are getting the protections we need to do our jobs safely, without putting ourselves or our families at risk of Covid exposure," said NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo, RN. "We can't safely care for our patients if we are sick ourselves."
"The Biden administration must quickly issue a final permanent Covid-19 healthcare standard--and retain the emergency temporary standard until the permanent standard goes into effect--before one more nurse is sidelined, lost to the profession, or lost to this world for good," she added.
In recent months, nurses have been ramping up their criticism of the Biden administration's pandemic response, which they've characterized as scattershot, confusing, and often too slow to adapt to predictable developments such as the rise of new and highly contagious variants.
Particularly appalling to nurses and other workers was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's decision last month to loosen isolation guidelines for people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections--a change that big businesses lobbied for.
The CDC's move is already impacting healthcare employees. As Politico reported earlier this week, many hospitals and long-term care facilities in the U.S. are "compelling Covid-positive doctors and nurses to return to work, arguing that bringing back asymptomatic or even symptomatic staff is the only way they can keep their doors open amid a spike in hospitalizations."
"The practice, allowed by the most recent CDC guidance, underscores the dire situation in which many facilities find themselves as more than 120,000 people nationwide are now hospitalized with the virus--almost three times the total from Thanksgiving when Omicron was first detected," the outlet noted.
On Thursday, nurses in 11 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. walked off the job to call attention to and protest dangerous working conditions.
"Our employers claim there is a 'nursing shortage,' and that's why they must flout optimal isolation times, but we know there are plenty of registered nurses in this country," said Triunfo-Cortez. "There is only a shortage of nurses willing to work in the unsafe conditions created by hospital employers and this government's refusal to impose lifesaving standards. So this is a vicious cycle where weakening protections just drives more nurses away from their jobs."
Castillo added in a statement that "the working conditions that our employers and the federal government are telling nurses and healthcare workers to endure are both grossly unfair and unsustainable, and we are standing up... to say, 'Enough!'"
"We need permanent protections based on science and we need them now," she added, "because when nurses and healthcare workers aren't safe, we cannot keep our patients safe."
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Disability Rights Advocates Condemn CDC Director's 'Abhorrent' Comments on Covid-19 Deaths
"Messages from the head of the CDC must convey that all lives are valuable, and the loss of any life from Covid-19, whether it is the life of a person with a disability, an older adult, or a 32-year-old with no known disabilities, is a tragedy."
Jan 10, 2022
Disability rights groups on Sunday were among those expressing horror at comments by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky regarding who is most likely to die from the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
On "Good Morning America" Friday, Walensky shared what she said was "encouraging news" about the variant which is driving case numbers to record highs in the U.S., saying, "The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities."
"So really these are people who were unwell to begin with," she added.
Susan Henderson, executive director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), shared on social media a letter she wrote to Walensky on Sunday in response to the remarks.
"Messages from the head of the CDC must convey that all lives are valuable, and the loss of any life from Covid-19, whether it is the life of a person with a disability, an older adult, or a 32-year-old with no known disabilities, is a tragedy," Henderson wrote.
Walensky's comments were denounced as "eugenicist" by Matthew Cortland, a lawyer and writer with a chronic illness, who also pointed out that rhetoric similar to the CDC director's has persisted since the first Covid-19 case in the U.S. was reported two years ago.
"People heard that only disabled and elderly people would die, and they said, 'Oh, psst, well we'll be fine then, right? We'll be okay,'" said writer Imani Barbarin about the early days of the pandemic on a panel about ableism hosted by Daily Kos last month. "But when you think about the fact that Indigenous and Black people have the highest rates of disability, it shifts the entire picture behind that instinct."
Walensky's remarks prompted people with disabilities to share their outrage using the hashtag #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthSaving on Twitter.
"Are our deaths less tragic? Are our lives less valuable? Are we less human?" asked disability rights and Medicare for All activist Ady Barkan. "We live in the wealthiest country in history. We can afford to give healthcare to everyone. We can afford enough masks, tests, and medical staff to keep everyone safe. But that requires seeing the full humanity of each of us."
Walensky attempted to clarify her comments Sunday, saying, "We must protect people with comorbidities from severe Covid-19," but critics including Cortland and physician Dr. Eric Reinhart said more must be done at the CDC and throughout the Biden administration to demonstrate that the White House is working to protect all Americans from the pandemic.
The administration drew condemnation from the disability rights community in recent weeks over its guidance for asymptomatic people with Covid-19, which said people to return to work and daily activities after only five days of isolation instead of 10 after testing positive.
White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients' statement last month that unvaccinated people are "looking at a winter of severe illness and death" also angered advocates, considering that people with disabilities are more likely to have trouble obtaining vaccines, according to ABC News.
"That 75% of Covid deaths were people with multiple comorbidities, i.e. people with disabilities, is not good news, despite what the CDC director says," tweeted Maria Town on Saturday regarding Walensky's comments. "It's news that reveals our national callousness to how difficult it is for disabled people to survive."
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'We Need a Global Solution': Critics Say Biden Plan to Boost Vaccine Supply Not Nearly Enough
"We are heartened, even as we sorely wish the U.S. government had taken far more ambitious and transformative steps six months ago, one year ago, 18 months ago."
Nov 17, 2021
Vaccine equity advocates said the White House's Wednesday announcement that it plans on ramping up domestic manufacturing to produce an additional one billion Covid-19 shots a year is a welcome step that still fails to meet the urgency of the moment.
The development, first reported by the New York Times, came amid sustained accusations that rich nations, including the U.S., are contributing to global Covid-19 "vaccine apartheid" by hoarding doses and insufficiently pressuring pharmaceutical companies--who are swirling in profits--to share their technology and know-how to bring the virus that's killed over five million people worldwide to an end.
"To truly protect everyone's interests, we need a global solution."
According to Our World in Data, only 4.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. In the U.S., by contrast, nearly 69% of the population has received at least one dose.
The Biden administration said the plan will see billions invested in an effort to address both the current and potential future pandemics. The Washington Post reported that the proposal would rely on companies that make mRNA vaccines, which include those manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna.
White House Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said production would start in the second half of 2022. David Kessler, who leads the White House's Covid-19 response, said, "We are looking to enter into a historic partnership with one or more experienced pharmaceutical partners" that the partnership would "be used for Covid and any future pandemic viruses with the goal of having enough vaccines available within six to nine months of the identification of the virus."
As Robbie Silverman, Oxfam America's senior advocacy manager, sees it, the plan leaves out a much-needed transfer of technology and problematically proposes increased production only within the U.S.
"In order to gain the upper hand on this and future pandemics," Silverman said in a statement, "manufacturing should be spread around the world, especially Africa, not limited to the U.S. We know the coronavirus does not respect national borders; to truly protect everyone's interests, we need a global solution."
In addition to needing to add "robust tech transfer" to its plan, Silverman said the U.S. should support a "comprehensive waiver" proposal for sharing Covid-19-related vaccines and technologies at the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting later this month.
"Will it amount to another subsidy to Moderna and Pfizer, or be controlled by, or at least accountable to, the public?"
Advocacy group Public Citizen--which earlier this year released a plan for how rich nations could produce eight billion coronavirus vaccine doses with a $25 billion investment--welcomed the newly announced manufacturing boost as a life-saving result of grassroots activists who've been pressuring the administration to address global vaccine inequity.
"We are heartened, even as we sorely wish the U.S. government had taken far more ambitious and transformative steps six months ago, one year ago, 18 months ago," Peter Maybarduk, director of the group's Access to Medicines program, said in a statement. "Nonetheless, a major investment to boost mRNA production can help save many lives, and potentially even shorten the pandemic."
However, "critical questions remain," said Maybarduk. "Who will control this added capacity?" he asked. "Will it amount to another subsidy to Moderna and Pfizer, or be controlled by, or at least accountable to, the public, including through use of the Defense Production Act?"
Like Silverman, Maybarduk lamented that the plan only calls for boosting production within the U.S. and leaves out technology transfer.
"Sharing doses is charity, and desperately needed," he said. "But sharing knowledge is justice."
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'End the Pandemic... Share the Vaccines!': All-Night Vigil Held Outside House of Top Biden Covid-19 Official
"We've tried every tactic to advance our policy goals, and yet the administration continues to pad Big Pharma's record profits instead of ending the pandemic."
Oct 29, 2021
A group of social justice advocates staged an overnight vigil Thursday into Friday outside the home of top White House coronavirus official Jeff Zients urging the Biden administration to take greater actions to "vaccinate the world."
"We rallied today, we marched, we spoke, and we visited Jeff Zients to make it clear to this administration that this pandemic will not end until we take global action," said Vinay Krishnan, Center for Popular Democracy Action's national field organizer, in a statement.
"Let's lift patents," he said, "and invest in the manufacturing capacity needed to end Covid in every country, in every community."
The action outside the home of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Zients was led by Justice is Global, a project of People's Action.
Holding signs with messages including "End the pandemic everywhere" and "Zients, wake up and do your job," the protesters drew attention to the global lives lost from Covid-19 and called for the administration to use its power to help push through a proposed intellectual property protections waiver for Covid vaccines and technology that other rich nations continue to block at the World Trade Organization.
The group also delivered a letter to Zients in which they urged him to harness his role as the official coronavirus response coordinator "to take the crucial actions needed" to enact the policies they say will help bring an end to the pandemic.
In addition to trying to push through the IP waiver, "the White House must also reexamine its decision to not share the technical recipe and process information that would be needed for expanded production and use existing power under the Defense Production Act to ensure we transfer all Covid-19 technologies including diagnostics and therapeutics," the letter states.
The group also said Biden "must support congressional efforts to appropriate $35 billion to fund global manufacturing hubs, including but not limited to the $2 billion included in the proposed reconciliation budget process."
Justice is Global deputy director Ben Levenson said in a statement that the activists " brought this global health crisis straight to Jeffrey Zients's front door because he and the Biden administration refuse to use the available tools to massively scale up production while millions of people in low- and middle-income countries wait for vaccines."
"We've tried every tactic to advance our policy goals, and yet the administration continues to pad Big Pharma's record profits instead of ending the pandemic," he added. "This is shameful, and we hope our actions are just the wake-up call the administration needs to finally act and vaccinate the world."
The overnight action followed a Washington, D.C. rally staged earlier Thursday by groups including Justice is Global and People's Action that made similar demands of the Biden administration.
"We hear of people throwing out vaccines," human rights advocate Pauline Muchina said at the rally. "How many vaccines have been destroyed instead of shared around the world? It is time to end vaccines apartheid!"
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Public Health Advocates Target Top Biden Aide, Moderna CEO in Protest Demanding Vaccine Equity
"Without real bold leadership... we risk being caught in this pandemic loop, constantly battling new variants coming from regions without the vaccine. The only way out of this pandemic is by vaccinating the world."
Sep 29, 2021
Public health advocates on Wednesday brought towering piles of prop bones to the homes of a top White House aide and Moderna's CEO in a bid to spur the Biden administration and Big Pharma to save countless lives around the world by ramping up Covid-19 vaccine production and technology-sharing.
"The world's current shortage of Covid-19 vaccines is really the result of deliberate policy choices."
--Dr. Rebecca Zash,
Harvard Medical School
Standing in front of the 12-foot-tall bone heap outside the Chevy Chase, Maryland residence of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, James Krellenstein--co-founder of the HIV prevention group PrEP4All--said that the top aide to President Joe Biden was being targeted because "one of the biggest problems that we see in this administration's response" is that "there's not a single person and a single chain of command that is dedicated to dealing with the international issues" regarding the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Really, we're bringing attention to the fact that both Moderna and the U.S. government have been completely inadequate in scaling up vaccine access globally," Krellenstein told Sinclair Broadcast Group.
According to The Washington Post:
The group also included longtime HIV/AIDS activists Peter Staley and Gregg Gonsalves, who defended the decision to protest outside of Klain's personal residence, contending that they had repeatedly tried to sway U.S. officials through standard channels. The activists said that they had regularly met with leaders such as Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious diseases expert, and White House coronavirus coordinator Jeffrey Zients and that they hoped those meetings would continue.
A similar protest was staged outside the Beacon Hill, Massachusetts home of Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel. Activists noted that the company received billions of dollars in public funds to develop its coronavirus vaccine, yet has not shared its intellectual property and technology with other nations or waived patent protections so that Global South manufacturers can produce generic doses.
"I'm here today because I'm so mad and so sad about the lack of equitable global access to Covid-19 vaccines," Dr. Rebecca Zash, an infectious disease specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, said at the Cambridge event.
"It's wrong, it's morally reprehensible, and it's personal to me," added Zash, who said she has friends and colleagues in Botswana--where she is a research associate at the Botswana Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership--who are "dying of Covid because of where they were born and their lack of access to vaccines."
Zash said the current situation evokes a sense of "deja vu to what HIV was like 20 years ago, when we had lifesaving HIV medicines that weren't available outside the U.S. or Europe, and I had to watch my peers who I was working with, who were my age--in their 20s and 30s--die from AIDS while the U.S. government administrators said it would be logistically difficult to [distribute] HIV medicines in Africa."
"Instead of showing the leadership the administration was elected and appointed to deploy, they're cowering in the face of greed."
--Asia Russell,
Health GAP
"They were totally wrong," Zash continued. "And as soon as there was a will to do it... it was wildly successful, and saved millions and millions of lives."
"And so now we're here because we're making the same mistake with Covid," said Zash. "The world's current shortage of Covid-19 vaccines is really the result of deliberate policy choices... Despite having the legal authority to scale production globally and billions of dollars from Congress, Biden has still spent less than 1% of this money scaling up production, and refused to compel companies like Moderna to share their technology."
Zash added that "this plan to donate 300 million or so vaccines to low-income countries is just too small, it's not enough. Millions and millions of people are going to die, people who just happen to live in another country."
"Vaccinating the world is in our own self-interest," she asserted. "Without real bold leadership from this administration, we risk being caught in this pandemic loop, constantly battling new variants coming from regions without the vaccine. The only way out of this pandemic is by vaccinating the world."
At the Maryland protest outside Klain's home, Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health GAP (Global Access Project), called the Biden administration's recent pledge to donate 1.1 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses a "rounding error."
"The reality is the untapped capacity of manufacturing exists right now," Russell asserted. "Instead of showing the leadership the administration was elected and appointed to deploy, they're cowering in the face of greed."
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'Affirmation of Complete Incompetence': Biden Team Says Trump Vaccine Distribution Plan Nonexistent
"There is nothing for us to rework," said one of President Biden's Covid advisers. "We are going to have to build everything from scratch."
Jan 20, 2021
In a development that critics say provides additional evidence of former President Donald Trump's incompetence and malfeasance, newly sworn-in President Joe Biden learned soon after Wednesday's inauguration that his administration will have to develop a coronavirus vaccine distribution strategy from "square one" because the previous administration departed without a federal inoculation plan in place.
"What we're inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined."
--Jeff Zients, White House
"There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch," one source with knowledge of the Biden team's pandemic response told CNN.
With more than 406,000 people having died from Covid-19 in the U.S. alone, and with seven-day averages of nearly 200,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths per day, Biden has pledged to ramp up the production and distribution of vaccines--vowing to inoculate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of his administration.
But the failure of the Trump administration to leave behind any national rollout plans has made that task more challenging. Describing the moment when it dawned on Biden's team that there was no vaccine strategy for them to build upon, another source told CNN: "Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence."
Along with many others, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) noted how unsurprising the news was, considering the Trump administration's penchant for dishonesty--including previous lies about vaccine distribution.
Biden's advisers had endured hostility from the Trump administration during the transition, but according to Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House's Covid-19 task force, "What we're inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined."
"We don't have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations," Zients said.
The Daily Beast reported Thursday that as the Biden administration "begin[s] to strategize on how best to remedy the situation they are finding that the foundation on which the Trump administration built its vaccine distribution program is more flawed than previously understood... From the accounting to the way vaccines are allocated and scheduled for delivery--the system doesn't allow for the quick movement of vaccines off the manufacturing line to state vaccine distribution points."
According to reporting from CNN, "Biden's Covid advisers had wanted to be careful not to be overly critical in public of the Trump administration's handling of the virus and vaccine, given that the Biden transition team was already having a hard time getting critical information and cooperation from the outgoing administration."
"Now that the transition of power has taken place, the Biden administration is hoping that they can quickly start to get a clearer picture of where things actually stand with vaccine distribution and administration across the country, going through something of a 'fact-checking' exercise on what exactly the Trump administration had and had not done," CNN noted.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Zients said that "for almost a year now, Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid. And we've seen the tragic costs of that failure."
"That'll change" now that Biden is in office, he added.
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