Although the race for the presidency is usually the center of attention in the election year, it is being overshadowed by the threat of the novel coronavirus. To try to limit the effect of the virus on the American population, the White House has assembled a task force headed by the Vice President and includes members from various fields. The task force “coordinates and oversees the Administration’s efforts to monitor, prevent, contain, and mitigate the spread” of the novel coronavirus. While this task force does include members such as Larry Kudlow (Director of National Economic Council), Steven Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury), Derek Kan (Office of Management and Budget), and others who are dealing with the financial aspects of the virus, this blog will focus more on the medical professionals.
The face of the Task Force is Dr. Anthony Fauci. His father was a pharmacist and their family would live in the apartment above the pharmacy. His mother and sister would work the front of the pharmacy and he was “delivering prescriptions from the time [he] was old enough to ride a bike.” He went to Holy Cross College and worked construction in the summers. He once snuck into the Cornell auditorium during a lunch break and a guard told him to leave, to which Fauci replied that he would be attending the institution a year from then. The guard laughed but Fauci attended the University and received an M.D. in 1966. He was appointed as the Director of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) in 1984 and has since advised six US Presidents on HIV/AIDS and other issues regarding health in America. In 2003, he played a significant role in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), which the NIH website claims “saved millions of lives throughout the developing world.” Dr. Fauci also testified during the Ebola virus crisis in 2014. He testified that screening was important but that NIAID was not very close to producing sufficient vaccines or cures. As we know well, Dr. Fauci has taken on the spread of the novel coronavirus in 2020. He believes that the fatality rate of the disease, COVID-19, will be close to 1%, which would still be ten times greater than that of the seasonal flu. 
He has also been adamant about “flattening the curve” which requires social distancing to slow the spread of the virus to ensure that the strain on the healthcare system is not overwhelming.
Deborah Leah Birx has also been a key member of the coronavirus task force. She has been responsible for the United States’ PEPFAR’s program in 65 different countries. She majored in chemistry at Houghton College and proceeded to earn a medical degree from Hershey School of Medicine at Pennsylvania State University (#WeAre). When she heard that President Bush had announced PEPFAR, she flew back from Kenya where she had been working for “about five or six years.” She then waited outside of the house of the Director of Office of National Aids Policy for a week in February to get a meeting. In a CNN article, it’s written, that “Birx went in with a Powerpoint presentation of ‘180 slides, and until he agreed to let us be part, to let the Army also be part of PEPFAR, I was not leaving his office, and so I wore him down.'” She was nominated by former President Obama as the United States Global AIDS Coordinator and met Obama’s HIV prevention and treatment targets. According to a 2019 State Department report, under her leadership, PEPFAR has saved the lives of 17 million people and prevented millions of HIV infections. She has urged that Millenials are the “core group” in nation-wide attempt to stop the virus. “I (am) the mom of two wonderful millennial young women who are bright and hardworking and I will tell you what I told to them — they are the core group that will stop this virus.”
Dr. Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General of the United States, is also part of the task force. The job of the office of the surgeon general is to be the operational head of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC). They are the leading spokesperson on matters of public health in the federal government. Dr. Adams attended medical school at Indiana University School of Medicine and received a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkley with a focus on disease prevention. In 2014, he was appointed as the Indiana State Health Commissioner by former governor of Indiana Mike Pence. When confirmed to his position as surgeon general in 2017, Dr. Adams said that his two main areas of focus would be mental illness and the opioid crisis. He once helped a sick passenger on an airplane after a flight attendant asked if there was a doctor on board (little did they know the nations’ top doctor would be there). After being appointed to the task force, he tweeted out, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” He also said that they are “hopeful that if we lean into this, then maybe in about six to eight weeks, we will have gotten over the majority of the pain, we will have flattened the curve and we can start to slowly get back to life as normal.”