While Pinarayi Vijayan is inching closer to what would become a flawed beginning for his second consecutive government over the outrage of dropping off KK Shailaja, who was praised for Covid handling, from his new cabinet, he has addressed the criticism by appointing a woman as a successor of Shailaja to lead the state's health mechanism amid surging COVID-19 cases. 

Pinarayi Vijayan will be swearing-in as the Chief Minister of Kerala on May 20 for the second consecutive time and on May 18, he has picked his cabinet ministers in which he dropped off Shailaja, who was the face of Kerala's fight against the Nipah and COVID-19 outbreaks during her tenure as the health minister. KK Shailaja, who is known as Shailaja teacher, was instrumental in building what was called the 'Kerala Model' to combat the pandemic. 

However, Vijayan has dropped Shailaja and all other ministers who were part of the cabinet in the previous government in his bid to induct new faces. Amid growing dissent against him for deciding to oust Shailaja from the cabinet at a high time when her experience is imperative to the state to tackle the second wave of the pandemic, Pinarayi Vijayan has now inducted Veena George as the new Health Minister of Kerala. 

Veena George is a CPI(M) leader and she has won from the Aranmula constituency in the Pathanamthitta district with a margin of 19,003 votes in the recently-held assembly polls. Veena was a well-known journalist and news anchor in various Malayalam news channels. She entered active politics in 2016 after winning from Aranmula by defeating the Congress party's candidate Sivadasan Nair. 

She had served as an MLA in the previous assembly and now she will be succeeding KK Shailaja as the new health minister. Veena is one of the 11 women MLAs elected to the Kerala assembly. She had gained 16 years of experience in journalism and in 2015, Veena was the first woman to head a media organization in Kerala when she became the executive editor of a Malayalam news channel. She also had worked with Manorama, Kairali, and IndiaVision. 

Veena is a rank holder of MSc (Physics) and BEd. She began her political career as an activist of the Students Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the CPI(M). Veena's husband Dr George Joseph, a higher secondary school teacher, has served as Secretary of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. Born in Thiruvananthapuram, 45-year-old Veena George is a mother of two and she is a member of the CPI(M) Pathanamthitta area committee. Veena George will become the first woman journalist in Kerala to become a minister. 

Veena's father was an advocate and she also had contested in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Pathanamthitta. However, she had lost the race to UDF's Anto Antony by a margin of 44,243 votes. Veena is all set to become the minister in her second term as an MLA and apart from her, Pinarayi Vijayan has also picked two other women in his second cabinet. On the other hand, several celebrities and activists are expressing their disappointments and dissents against Vijayan for dropping off Shailaja from his cabinet to address the COVID-19 crisis. It must be noted that the ruling LDF has won 99 seats of 140 assembly seats in the recently-held assembly elections.