Rapid Response: The Covid test facts every CEO needs, w/Rajiv Shah (Rockefeller Foundation)
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
To safely re-open a business, you need more than masks. Covid testing is key – and the options are changing quickly. We found the most in-the-know person in public health to walk us through the choices, costs, and protocols to keep an entrepreneurial team, and all of us, safe. Rajiv Shah is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which has led response to health crises in the United States and around the world for 100 years (including the 1918 flu pandemic). Applying what he learned fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Shah has brought together business, government, and health officials to turbo-charge Covid testing development. Next-gen test kits are coming soon: cheaper, easier, more abundant. If deployed correctly, says Shah, they can make us all safer and healthier in 2021.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In mid to late February, we felt strongly that this was going to be a multi-year global threat. |
| 0:07.0 | We had put in place a major new $100 million program to address COVID-19. |
| 0:15.0 | We said, let's create a national strategy for American testing. |
| 0:18.0 | We came up with a consensus plan to get from about five or six hundred thousand tests a week to 30 million tests a week. |
| 0:27.0 | What we were staring at was a lockdown that was costing America almost $400 billion a month, |
| 0:33.0 | almost all of the burden of that pain and suffering being placed on working American families, |
| 0:39.0 | essential workers, minority and vulnerable communities. |
| 0:43.0 | We've estimated this would cost about $45 billion to do. |
| 0:47.0 | That is the best $45 billion America can spend right now. |
| 0:52.0 | It would allow kids to go to school, it would allow elderly people in nursing homes to be safer, |
| 0:57.0 | and frankly it would be an expression of our values. |
| 1:01.0 | We can use this moment to reassess our ambitions and try to make the world more equitable, more fair and more inclusive. |
| 1:11.0 | People ask me am I optimistic or pessimistic about 2021 and COVID-19? |
| 1:16.0 | And my answer is actually I am optimistic. |
| 1:23.0 | That's Rajeev Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. |
| 1:28.0 | Since the pandemic began, Raj has played a critical role in building COVID-19 testing capacity, |
| 1:34.0 | foraging a bipartisan coalition of governors, mayors, health officials and business leaders. |
| 1:40.0 | I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. |
| 1:49.0 | I wanted to talk to Raj because he's at the center of one of the most important high stakes responses to coronavirus. |
| 1:56.0 | The former head of USAID, former chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture, |
| 2:01.0 | former executive at the Gates Foundation. |
| 2:04.0 | Raj has a network and access to information that few can match. |
... |
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