Cashing-in on COVID?

Another Biden Nominee Raises Eyebrows

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Yet another would-be Biden appointee has come under heightened scrutiny. This time, it’s former Obama Surgeon General and current Biden nominee Vivek Murthy.
 
According to a new story from the Washington Post, Murthy had previously served in the same role under President Obama and was reported to be a close public health advisor to then-candidate Biden throughout his 2020 campaign.  Therefore, it came as little surprise that he would be nominated to fill his old role under the new administration.
 
During his past tenure in office, his partisan pronouncements about Second Amendment freedoms constituting a public health hazard earned him the ire of many conservatives.
This time, he is facing new questions about his financial dealings during the pandemic.  While many Americans suffered job losses and financial hardship with the spread of the coronavirus last year, Murthy’s recently-filed ethics disclosures show the pandemic actually functioned as something of a boon to his personal income.  
 
Since January of 2020, Murthy disclosed a whopping $2.6 million worth of income he raked in from consulting services and speaking fees related to the pandemic. He also accepted stock options and compensated advisory roles for several companies.  Notably, he was paid $400,000 by Carnival Cruise Lines, parent company of the Diamond Princess that was quarantined at sea for 39 days in the early days of the pandemic, and another $402,000 from vacation rental giant Airbnb.  In fact, as quarantines trapped vacationers at home and shrunk travel budgets, Murthy’s name was repeatedly invoked by Airbnb in what appeared to be an effort to monetize the former surgeon general’s medical expertise to encourage vacationers not to cancel or postpone their stays.
 
Now, Murthy’s COVID windfall is raising eyebrows as he seeks confirmation before the U.S. Senate.  In fact, if confirmed, the report states that Murthy would enter the normally obscure role with the most financial entanglements of any other surgeon general nominee in recent history.  The optics of this situation have not been lost on ethics and transparency watchdogs, who have questioned whether such a surgeon general could credibly render impartial and trustworthy counsel about the pandemic. They’ve raised concerns related to the revolving door Murthy would be walking through from government to private sector and back and his lucrative history of consulting on all things COVID.
 
Public health emergencies are no time to take gambles with the public’s confidence in the guidance issued by government officials.  Contradictory and nonsensical orders on masking, ever-shifting definitions of herd immunity, the unreliable COVID PCR test, and the decisions about schools reopening and lockdown orders that have no scientific backing have done nothing to inspire confidence in the federal government’s response to the pandemic‒ and neither, it seems, will Vivek Murthy.