Who is Rachel Levine? Biden pick for assistant health secretary to be 1st openly transgender federal official
Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine has been selected by President-elect Joe Biden to serve as his assistant secretary of health, making her the first openly transgender federal official poised to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Levine, a former Pennsylvania physician general, was appointed to her current position by Gov. Tom Wolf in 2017. At the time, she was confirmed by the Republican-majority Pennsylvania Senate, who later criticized her for the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond," Biden said in a statement. "She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”
Levine, who graduated from Harvard and Tulane Medical School, has written in the past on pertinent subjects such as the opioid crisis, medical marijuana, adolescent medicine, eating disorders, and LGBTQ medicine, ABC News reported.
According to the report, Biden and his transition team are already negotiating with members of Congress to expedite passage of the president-elect's $1.9 trillion plan to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed nearly 400,000 lives in the United States. It reportedly seeks to "enlist federal emergency personnel to run mass vaccination centers and provide 100 [million] immunization shots in his administration’s first 100 days." Biden has also vowed to enforce a nationwide mask mandate for the first 100 days of his administration in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19.
That said, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has described Levine as “a remarkable public servant with the knowledge and experience to help us contain this pandemic, and protect and improve the health and well-being of the American people.”
Levine grabbed headlines last year after she faced a major backlash for sending patients recovering from COVID-19 back to nursing homes after being treated in hospitals. Pennsylvania's Republican members of Congress sent a letter to the state’s attorney general, describing the policy as "deadly" and calling for Levine to resign over her handling of the outbreak as the state's health secretary.
“Our secretary of health, Dr. Levine, decided that it would be good to allow COVID-positive patients to be returned to elder-care facilities. And as a result of that, it broke out like fire,” Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano said at a rally in May 2020.
Nonetheless, Levine now joins Biden's Health and Human Services secretary nominee Xavier Becerra, a Latino politician who served in Congress and as California's attorney general, to lead the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
According to the report, entrepreneur Jeff Zients is set to become Biden's coronavirus response coordinator. Meanwhile, infectious-disease expert Rochelle Walensky is slated to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vivek Murthy as surgeon general, and Yale epidemiologist Marcella Nunez-Smith will "head a working group to ensure fair and equitable distribution of vaccines and treatments."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's so-called top infectious disease expert, is also looking forward to working closely with the Biden administration.
