354: Harvard Global Health Institute Director Ashish Jha, part 1: Front Line Pandemic Leadership

July 2, 2020 by Joshua
in Podcast

If you’ve followed sensible, expert advice on the pandemic, you’ve probably read or seen Ashish Jha in the New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, Washington Post, and everywhere. On Tuesday he testified to the US Senate.

He’s Harvard’s Global Health Institute’s Director. Over 200,000 people have taken his online Harvard courses, which you can for free. Over 80,000 took Ebola, Preventing the Next Pandemic and over 120,000 took Improving Global Health: Focusing on Quality and Safety. As it turns out, we were college teammates on the ultimate frisbee team.

I’ll link to a few top articles by him. With so many interfaces between the pandemic and us—health, government, research, policy, etc—you can read a lot of his views and experiences from different sources.

I wanted to bring the personal side of leading on the front lines and top levels of a pandemic—how do doctors and public health experts feel about people not following advice, facing triage decisions, how to be heard, and what affects a doctor personally. We talk about leadership, the intersection between the pandemic and the environment, which overlaps with his directorship and courses, and more.

By the way, he created his Ebola course five years before this pandemic and predicted much of it, as did many. If predicting what’s happened so far isn’t enough reason to follow his advice, I don’t know what is. Let’s wear those masks

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