The Thought Leader Interview: Dr. Thomas Frieden

The former director of the CDC and current head of Resolve to Save Lives explains why public health is the route to economic health.

- DANIEL GROSS

Dr. Thomas Frieden has spearheaded efforts to improve public health for more than three decades. Few executives have more experience in lead-ing large public health bureaucracies as they confront epidemics. After earning degrees in medicine and public health from Columbia University, he served as assistant commissioner of health and director of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Tuberculosis Control, where his effort to combat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis became an international model. As health commissioner for New York City from 2002 to 2009, he implemented many of then mayor Michael Bloomberg’s far-reaching efforts to reduce smoking and combat diabetes and obesity. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which he directed from 2009 to 2017, he managed the successful response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Since 2017, Frieden has run Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit backed by philanthropists including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies that aims to save 100 million lives by fighting cardiovascular disease and epidemics. In an interview with strategy+business editor-in-chief Daniel Gross, Frieden discussed effective strategies for combating the virus and how all leaders can adapt some best practices from epidemiology to make their operations more resilient to unexpected threats.

S+B: Epidemiology has really come to the fore in the past few months, as it has become evident that our global systems can’t run effectively in the age of coronavirus. It strikes me that epidemiologists have a lot to teach people who are leading organizations — not just how to think about COVID-19, but also how to think about other systemic and viral types of problems that can infect their networks and ecosystems. What are the components of an effective public health strategy?