At the weekly briefings, Mr. Zients was joined by Dr. Fauci; Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and sometimes Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general.
But behind the scenes, he is a logistics man who manages a vast operation that has cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. He has spent much of his time in sometimes intense meetings with drug and insurance company executives, governors, and state and local health officials.
Recently, he helped orchestrate the delivery of nearly 400 million N95 masks to Americans, free of charge. And officials said his discussions with Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, helped shave months off the development of the company’s antiviral pill; the government has committed to buying 20 million doses.
When transportation became a barrier to vaccination, Mr. Zients persuaded the chief executives of Uber and Lyft to offer free rides, said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who advised the White House on racial equity issues. When lack of child care and vacation leave became obstacles, he persuaded day care centers to offer free care and companies to offer free time off.
“I could call him any time of the day or night and say, ‘This is a problem, we’ve got to solve for this,’” she said. “Jeff’s job all day was solving for this.”
Critics have said Mr. Zients, who made a fortune building two consultancies and taking them public, was an odd pick to run the pandemic response given his lack of experience in public health. But his past work touched on health care, both as the chief executive of the Advisory Board Company, a health care consultancy, and in the Obama administration, where he ran the effort to fix the healthcare.gov website.
During the surge of cases — and deaths — this winter, some blamed Mr. Zients for failing to do enough to prevent them, particularly when the highly transmissible Omicron variant caught the administration unprepared. Some supporters of Mr. Biden — particularly those on the Democratic left — were openly disdainful of both Mr. Zients and Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff.
