President Biden\u00a0plans to nominate Rahul Gupta, a former West Virginia health official, to serve as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, a White House official confirmed.<\/p>\n
Gupta served as the commissioner for the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health under two governors from 2015 to 2018 and is an ally of Sen.\u00a0Joe Manchin\u00a0(D-W.Va.). In that role, Gupta led the state’s opioid crisis response efforts and spearheaded other public health initiatives, like the neonatal abstinence syndrome birth score program meant to identify children at high risk for infant mortality.<\/p>\n
Gupta is currently the chief medical and health officer and senior vice president at March of Dimes, a nonprofit that looks to improve the health of mothers and babies, and has been a practicing primary care physician for 25 years.<\/p>\n
Gupta, who served on Biden\u2019s transition team, would be the first physician to serve as the nation\u2019s drug czar and was seen as a favorite to receive the nomination. The office, housed in the White House, is responsible for reducing substance abuse by coordinating the nation\u2019s drug policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Biden\u00a0plans to nominate Rahul Gupta,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37621,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37620\/revisions\/37621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}