Dr. Rajiv Shah
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Rajiv Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And she ran away as she should have. And I just thought, you know, if you get to be involved in expressing that humanity, you actually get a lot more back than you give. You get a sense of humanity. and you feel better off for it. I was hooked from that first moment, but I didn't quite know how to find my path.
Grad school where you can get employed and paid was sort of the theme. So I did, I ended up getting a, full scholarship to go to medical school and also study economics and business. And I did that simultaneously. And I was working through that. I wanted to get a shot at participating in American politics.
And so I kept applying while I was a student for a job, not even a job, a volunteer opportunity. Wasn't even expecting that anyone would pay me to work on Al Gore's presidential campaign. And I wrote this heartfelt letter and I put in the mail and I thought, who says no to someone who's going to volunteer for free? The answer is Al Gore's campaign. They said no twice.
And then they moved their campaign office from Washington to Nashville, Tennessee. And a friend told me, just do it one more time. And I sent a third letter and they said, we'd love to have you come to Nashville. So the day after I took my medical board exams,
My then girlfriend, now wife, and I got into my little Mercury Cougar, this little black car, drove 14 and a half hours from Philadelphia to Nashville, Tennessee, stayed in Al Gore's mom's best friend's pool house for the next three months as I started on the campaign.
As low as you can start as a volunteer driving people around because I was the only volunteer that had a car and most were high school kids and young kids. And that's how it all got started.
First, I didn't know at the time. I just wanted to try it and give myself a chance. And I like to note in retrospect that big bets start with betting on yourself. And While that sounds grandiose, I didn't have the courage to do that on my own back then. It was my girlfriend at the time, now wife, she knew me better than I knew myself. And she's like, this is something you want to do.
I had an amazing advisor, a gentleman named Dr. Sandy Schwartz at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, who said, you know, you have this scholarship. We'll hold on to it for you. Go try this and you'll never look back. And that's what happened. And then, of course, we lost that campaign, by the way, so.
So I found myself unemployed, not sure what to do, thinking, oh, I really screwed this up. Went back to med school, but now I was behind, finished up there briefly. And then one thing led to another and through a friend who I'd met on the campaign.
He said, hey, you know, Bill Gates is looking for someone who knows a little bit about economics, a little bit about health and medicine, a little bit about policy and politics, but not too much on any of those fronts. And I said, well, maybe I could do that. And I joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Oh, absolutely. In fact, I mean, I was lost. I was back in school, but I knew I didn't want to go through with being a practicing full-time position. I knew I'd sort of fallen in love with policy and service, if not politics. And then my closest friends from the campaign were all doing super interesting things, and I was back in school. So I was really lost.
But at the same time, I tell people now that especially early in your career when you make decisions, you should place a high priority on the people you'll meet in that role because that network will tend to expand your own thinking and open up opportunities and reshape you as an individual in a way that can be very powerful.
And if you look at the team that joined the Gates Foundation when Bill and Melinda first set it up, it was just an extraordinary group of people. And the fact that I got to be basically an early intern there made all the difference in the world. I got to learn from some really special leaders, including Bill and Melinda, but also others at the institution.
Yeah, one of the chapters of the book is called Ask a Simple Question, because my job as the sort of analyst on the team early was to basically model out what it would cost and what the strategy needed to be to ensure that every child on the planet was fully vaccinated. And at the time, about 40% or 45% of the global population was fully vaccinated.
As I mentioned, an 11.5 million kids were dying under the age of five. Many of those deaths were vaccine-preventable disease. And almost all of the unvaccinated kids were in 70 plus developing economies around the world.
So we looked at that challenge and we would keep coming back and Bill would have us all gather in this big cavernous kind of conference room on the top floor of this renovated call center, which was the early headquarters of the place. And he'd keep asking, what would it take to vaccinate every child? And some of the best experts in the world would come in
and say, well, you can't really think about it that way. That's a little too ambitious. Here's how this works. It's very complex. But he kept coming back to that simple question over and over and over again. And over a two-year period, We actually modeled what it would cost. We figured out what the cost benefit was.
We studied the industry enough to understand that you couldn't even get to that goal unless you reshape the global supply base for vaccine manufacturing. And you couldn't do that without reshaping the way the world finances vaccines.
And frankly, we created this innovative group of capital markets experts, mostly in New York, called the Out of the Box Group, that invented a structure that became something called the International Finance Facility for Immunization that helped reshape that global marketplace. You know, 20 years later, tens of millions of additional children have been vaccinated.
Well, billions, more than a billion vaccinations have been delivered and nearly 20 million kids' lives have been saved thanks to not just the small team in that conference room, but the thousands of people working together across different institutions and across 70 countries over two decades. And that's a big bet. Big bet is saying, I don't just want to help a few people somewhere.
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