Carrie Gavit

Chief medical correspondent, CNN

As one of the most recognizable and respected faces in the medical community, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been addressing COVID-19 since the beginning. The neurosurgeon has used his platform to hold global town halls alongside journalist Anderson Cooper, answering questions from around the country and around the world. He also started the podcast Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction to help dispel the myths surrounding the virus.

And when it came time to reopen schools, Gupta released a video describing one of the toughest decisions he’s ever had to make as a father: whether to send his children to school or keep them at home. Ultimately, he followed the science and detailed why he was keeping his children home. While not everyone agreed with his choice, the heartfelt video summed up the discussions many parents were having and went viral, being picked up by multiple news networks and websites.

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50

Founder and CEO, W2O

Following a year in which W2O expanded via several high-profile acquisitions and saw revenue breach the $200 million plateau, Weiss and his team turned its attention to — what else? — COVID-19. Weiss became a trustee of The Commons Project, the nonprofit behind a well-regarded coronavirus risk-assessment and mapping platform, while the company backed Ventilator SOS and engineered a push to provide thousands of N95 face masks to medical facilities.

“Everyone feels a sense of, ‘We’re in a fight,’” Weiss told MM+M in April. “People on our team want to feel empowered while they’re sitting at home and coping with work and managing young children. They want to feel like they’re part of the solution.”

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50

Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Dr. Robert Redfield has steered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the most tumultuous year in its 74-year existence. It hasn’t been easy.

While Redfield’s training as an infectious disease specialist focused on HIV and AIDS gave him additional insight into the challenges presented by COVID-19, his agency has had to work overtime to inform an occasionally skeptical public about all things related to the virus. However, amid the crisis, he has spoken candidly about the deficiencies of the nation’s public-health apparatus.

“Years of underinvestment in public health have led to a system that has been sorely tested by the current pandemic,” Redfield said during a September hearing before Congress. “COVID-19 is the most significant public-health challenge to face our nation in more than a century. Now is the time to build not only the public-health core capability that our nation needs, but that the people of our nation deserve.”

Observers note that the CDC’s work may have been hamstrung by the Trump administration, especially after daily COVID-19 case data briefly vanished from the CDC’s website in July. 

The agency caused a problem of its own when two controversial COVID-19 guidances were posted — and then withdrawn — within days. 

While the agency stumbled during the early days of the pandemic — to be fair, the scientific and research communities hadn’t yet weighed in on the importance of masking and other preventive measures — Redfield never wavered in his belief that the CDC has always based its decisions on science. “We’re not an opinion organization,” he said in a September speech to CDC employees. “We’re a science-based, data-driven organization. That’s why CDC has the credibility around the world that it has.”

Redfield also serves as the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50

CEO, Twitter

Twitter’s outsized role during COVID-19 is simultaneously absurd and expected. Known for hot takes, insults and character limits, Twitter hardly seems suitable for comms during an international pandemic. 

But as CEO Jack Dorsey knows, Twitter’s speed and reach are why power users such as President Donald Trump use it. It’s also why Twitter took on the fact-checker role, adding warning labels and deleting tweets to address COVID-19 misinformation. For example, Twitter nixed a Trump tweet in August about the coronavirus U.S. death toll, a move that won the praise of vaccine advocate Ethan Lindenberger. It’s also been ramping up such labels as the presidential election draws closer.

The company’s internal policies also generated headlines. Twitter was one of the first major companies to send employees home, and it was also an early adopter of a general work-from-home policy, announcing that some staffers will work remotely permanently after COVID-19 restrictions are eased. It also gave all employees $1,000 for work-from-home supplies.

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50

Director-general, World Health Organization

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ career is marked by firsts. The Ethiopian biologist and public health researcher is the first African director-general of the World Health Organization and the first director-general who is not a medical doctor. 

Ghebreyesus was also the first director-general elected in a vote open to all member states and had women representing 60% of appointments in his senior leadership team. He campaigned on the issue of universal health coverage and made it the focus of his speech during the 72nd session of the U.N. General Assembly. 

Ghebreyesus oversaw the WHO management of the Kivu Ebola epidemic, but the hardest challenge of his career to date remains the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Despite some criticism over his timing of declaring the pandemic and working with the Chinese government, Ghebreyesus urged countries to increase testing for the virus.

He stressed the virus should not be politicized when President Donald Trump threatened to cut U.S. funding to the WHO in April and pulled the U.S. out of the organization in July, effective in one year. In June, he discussed how new evidence about the virus prompted the WHO to encourage mask wearing. During the height of the pandemic, his following on Twitter grew to 1.2 million, and he used the platform to keep the world abreast of developments. 

Before the WHO, he was the Minister of Health of Ethiopia, where he was elected the board chair of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50

Executive director, National Nurses United

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bonnie Castillo was among the first to sound an alarm about the need to be properly prepared for a surge in cases. But while Castillo has fought for nurses over her entire career — she’s a registered nurse herself — 2020 proved her greatest battle. 

Amid dangerous conditions, members of National Nurses United demonstrated across the U.S. for access to safe protective equipment and for diminished patient workloads. The organization also held two large protests in front of the White House, during which advocates demanded better support for nurses and other frontline workers. It has also supported progressive causes such as Medicare for All and Black Lives Matter.

Castillo approaches her role with a populist mindset. Under her leadership, National Nurse United conducted several surveys to determine whether nurses felt their workplaces were prepared for an infectious disease outbreak and had proper procedures and equipment in place to treat COVID-19 patients.

Those surveys, conducted in late February, found a widespread lack of preparation in hospitals nationwide. Later surveys found nurses were being denied access to COVID-19 tests, even after exposure to the virus.

Castillo testified before Congress in June, demanding more protective equipment and advocating for better support for nurses on the frontlines of the pandemic. “Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus began, nurses have been risking their lives every day to provide patient care to those in need,” Castillo told a House committee. “Across the country, they have been denied the necessary protections to prevent exposure to COVID-19.” 

Click here to go back to the Health Influencer 50