Who is Robert Rodriguez? Texas doctor on President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 task force
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris announced the names of the public experts who will make up their transition team’s coronavirus advisory board — including a doctor whose hometown is Brownsville, Texas.
Dr. Robert Rodriguez, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, will be among the members of the team headed by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administrator Commissioner Dr. David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of medicine at Yale University, according to a release from the Biden-Harris transition team.
In an exclusive interview with ABC7 in July, Rodriguez, who is now a San Francisco emergency physician, said that the strain on healthcare providers is “overwhelming” amid the pandemic.
“Everybody is wearing masks here. The spread is not because people aren’t being responsible. I think it’s largely due to socioeconomic issues,” Rodriguez said to ABC. “The best way you can take care of frontline providers and everybody else here in the hospital is by taking care of yourself.”
Rodriguez told ABC he spent the summer battling the virus in Brownsville, his hometown located on the U.S.-Mexico border, after a critical surge in the ICU where there were only six physicians working around the clock.
“They’ve been just working non-stop,” he said, according to the TV station. “They’re exhausted. There’s not a deep bench of physicians like there is in the Bay Area.”
According to the Washington Post, Biden and his team are set to inherit the worst crisis since the Great Depression as the nation enters its third surge of the virus.
“The pandemic is getting significantly more worrisome all across the country,” Biden said on Friday. “I want everyone to know on day one, we’re going to put our plan to control this virus into action.”
By the time Biden takes office January 20, a model created by the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation projects there will be “more than 372,000 COVID-19 deaths ... 135,000 more than the current total,” CNN said.
“By the time that the Biden-Harris administration takes over, this virus is going to have already run rampant through the communities across the United States,” Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, said to CNN.