Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, some healthcare leaders have risen to the top as the greatest in the world, according to a May 13 report published by Fortune.
- mRNA-vaccine pioneers: BioNTech's co-founders Ugur Sahin, MD, PhD, and Ozlem Tureci, MD; Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, PhD; and Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel all contributed to the technology behind Pfizer's and Moderna's COVID-19 shots becoming widely available to the public.
- Seth Berkley, MD. CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance: Gavi is a collaborative effort of healthcare organizations that has saved millions of children from dying of preventable diseases.
- Aparna Hegde, MD. Founder and Chair of Armman: Dr. Hegde witnessed many horrors delivering babies at a government hospital in Mumbai. That's what led her in 2008 to found Armman, an organization focused on bettering outcomes through the use of low-cost technology.
- Kate Bingham. Head of the U.K.'s Vaccine Taskforce: Ms. Bingham, a venture capitalist focused on biotech and healthcare startups, headed the U.K.'s Vaccine Taskforce, the group charged with ensuring Britain obtained enough of COVID-19 vaccines.
- Ala Stanford, MD. Founder of Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium: Dr. Stanford is a pediatric surgeon in the Philadelphia suburbs who spent the early days of the pandemic trying to provide COVID-19 tests to the area's communities of color. She founded a nonprofit to treat the city's most vulnerable and underserved populations, and to improve vaccine equity that has eluded the U.S.
- Diana Berrent. Founder of Survivor Corps: Survivor Corps began with the goal of mobilizing plasma donations. It now has partners across the healthcare industry and is involved in helping patients access antibody treatments, supporting clinical studies and developing diagnostic standards for "long" COVID-19.
- Ching-Hon Pui, MD. Chair of Oncology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (Memphis, Tenn.): Dr. Pui has spent his entire career at St. Jude, perfecting the treatment that now cures more than 90 percent of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Just as importantly, he has shared that life-saving knowledge, publishing nine books and more than 1,000 medical papers, book chapters and monographs.
- Epidemiologists of Social Media: Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the science communication lead for The Atlantic's COVID Tracking Project, regularly conducts Q&As via Instagram. Ellie Murray, ScD, is known for animating illustrations in her educational videos.