Dr. Anthony Fauci praised Ron Klain on Monday, the person selected by former Vice President Joe Biden to be his White House chief of staff.
“I know him well and his style and he did an absolutely terrific job with Ebola,” Fauci said, praising Biden’s choice in a video conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said he was “personally encouraged” that Biden selected Klain as his chief of staff.
“Your instincts are correct Mark because I had extensive experience with Ron Klain when he was the coordinator of the Ebola response during the Obama administration,” Fauci replied. “He is the chief of staff for President-elect Biden.”
Klain served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and was chosen by former President Barack Obama’s to coordinate the government response to Ebola in 2014 and 2015.
Fauci said he had not had a detailed conversation of what Klain and Biden would do once they got to the White House, but he endorsed the idea of having a centralized coordinator to bring about the best of each government agency.
“I know Ron and I know his style … he certainly knows what he’s doing and knows the ins and outs of how to respond,” Fauci said.
During the conversation, Fauci complained that different states were taking different approaches to slow the spread of the virus, noting that some states were not closing bars or instituting mask mandates.
“You can’t have one thing, one state, one region doing things one way, another one the other way, because what you impacts the entire country,” he said, and added, “We’ve got to be able to get control of this outbreak in a way that is consistent and uniform.”
Klain famously said in 2009 the Obama administration did “every possible thing wrong” in their response to the H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak.
“Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time and it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said at a Pandemic and Biosecurity Policy Summit in 2019.
“It had nothing to do with us doing anything right, it just had to do with luck.”