Carrie Gavit

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.”

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The agency caused a problem of its own when two controversial COVID-19 guidances were posted — and then withdrawn — within days.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

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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.

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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.

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Dean of the faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The coronavirus pandemic has brought long-standing health inequities to the fore, from access issues to racial disparities. And as frontline clinicians tend to COVID’s acute-care cases, public-health advocates such as Dr. Michelle Williams are having a moment. 

Williams, a renowned epidemiologist and public health scientist, hasn’t been shy about seizing it. She has leveraged the increased attention around health imbalances to eloquently and powerfully garner more attention for causes such as preventive health and social determinants of health. 

In June, following the death of George Floyd while in police custody, she issued a statement that Floyd’s death was more than a grave injustice. Rather, she characterized it as “a gut-wrenching consequence of what we in the public health community know all too well, and a reality that people of color are confronted with every day: Racism is a public health crisis.” 

As Williams pointed out, police brutality should be included alongside other disparities in healthcare, such as pollution exposure, access to green space and a lack of nutritious food and educational opportunities that have prematurely ended lives in marginalized communities. “While the COVID-19 pandemic has newly laid these inequities bare for all Americans to see, the underlying injustices have endured for generations,” she wrote.

This concern extends to her academic role. Because minority students can face hurdles to securing admission, last year Williams launched a pilot program at the Chan School. It had twin goals: to enroll more underrepresented students in the school

of public health and to provide them with a strong foundation toward studying for a doctorate. The program provides full tuition, health insurance, a stipend and mentoring by a senior faculty member.

A Princeton grad who earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Chan School, Williams joined the faculty after a distinguished career at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where she rose through the faculty ranks to become a full professor of epidemiology in 2000. She became dean of Harvard’s school of public health in July 2016 after a stint as chair and professor of its department of epidemiology. 

Those skills are coming in handy now. Amid the twin crises of COVID-19 and social unrest, Williams has been one of the most pronounced voices of leadership. She has emphasized social determinants of health in media appearances, too, with one outlet describing her as “bringing preventive health and wellness to the masses.”

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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.” 

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