President-elect Joe Biden yesterday picked California attorney general Xavier Becerra for secretary of health and human services  as one of his administration’s top officials to fight the raging coronavirus pandemic.
Biden, who takes office on January 20, also chose Dr Rochelle Walensky, chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to run the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Biden formally tapped Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as his chief medical adviser on the virus.
Biden named Jeff Zients, an economic adviser known for his managerial skills, as a coronavirus “czar” to oversee the response that will soon include an unprecedented operation to distribute hundreds of millions of doses of a new vaccine, co-ordinating efforts across multiple federal agencies.
“This team of world-class medical experts and public servants will be ready on Day One to mobilise every resource of the federal government to expand testing and masking,” Biden said in a statement, adding that they would “oversee the safe, equitable, and free distribution of treatments and vaccines.”
More than 282,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to a Reuters tally.
Authorities in California, the most populous state in the country with about 40mn residents, yesterday compelled much of the state to close shop and stay at home the day after it reported a record 30,000-plus new cases.
Biden chose Becerra, 62, a Latino former congressman, as he faces more pressure to add diversity to his Cabinet appointments, including complaints from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about the number of Latinos.
Biden has announced top nominees for his national security and economic teams.
The Democrat has pressed ahead with the transition to the White House even as Republican President Donald Trump refuses to concede the November 3 election and wages a foundering effort to overturn the results.
Dozens of Trump’s legal challenges have been rejected by the courts, the latest yesterday when a federal judge in Detroit tossed a bid to decertify Biden’s election victory in Michigan.
In Georgia, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said his office would recertify the state’s election results after a third count confirmed Biden’s win.
Electors from Georgia will be named today and meet December 14, the date set for the Electoral College to formalise the result.
Raffensperger said continued debunked claims about voting fraud is “hurting our state.”
Two runoff elections for the senate, scheduled for January 5, will determine which party controls the chamber.
Meanwhile, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has led legal challenges in several states, was being treated in a Washington hospital after testing positive for the virus.
The 76-year-old former New York City mayor’s age puts him in a high-risk group, and the New York Times and ABC reported he was hospitalised on Sunday in Washington.
Giuliani’s diagnosis comes after he had been crisscrossing the country, leading the president’s defiant – and unsuccessful – effort to undo Joe Biden’s victory in the November 3 presidential election.
During his travels, Giuliani has been seen frequently without a mask: on Wednesday, he was at the Michigan state assembly in Lansing with his face uncovered for a hearing that lasted more than four hours.
On Thursday, CNN showed footage of him in Atlanta walking maskless down a hall chatting with several other people whose faces were uncovered.
Biden’s choice of Becerra adds a politician to a health effort that would otherwise largely rely on government administrators and health experts.
During his time in Congress, Becerra played a role in passing the Affordable Care Act, Democratic president Barack Obama’s main domestic policy achievement.
In his current role in California, he leads a coalition of 20 states defending the programme better known as Obamacare against Republican attacks, including in a case before the Supreme Court last month.
US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi described the healthcare team selections as “critical in the fight to crush the coronavirus and defend every American’s right to quality, affordable healthcare.”
Fauci said he would be involved in all aspects of the response.