Alex Azar
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Alex Azar To Americans: ‘Please Get The Vaccine’
Keynote Speaker
24th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2018-2021)
Alex Azar has extensive healthcare experience in the senior-most levels of the U.S. government and the private sector that gives him a unique perspective and background. He has committed his professional career to protecting and enhancing the health of all Americans.
CONTACT WSB FOR Alex Azar'S SPEAKING FEES
Alex Azar has extensive healthcare experience in the senior-most levels of the U.S. government and the private sector that gives him a unique perspective and background. He has committed his professional career to protecting and enhancing the health of all Americans.
Azar served as the 24th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2018-2021), leading over 85,000 employees with a budget of over $1.4 trillion, the largest budget of any cabinet department on Earth. He was the architect of Operation Warp Speed, delivering COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics in record time. He led the historic transformation of the healthcare system in the United States and HHS’s response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. He drove U.S. Government efforts to tackle the opioid crisis, increase private insurance options, bring transparency of price and quality information to healthcare, expand telehealth, give patients ownership of their health records and make those records interoperable and transportable, enable healthcare provider collaborative care models, remove regulatory barriers to low-cost, high-quality care, transform payment systems to pay for health and outcomes rather than sickness and procedures, reduce drug prices, and transform kidney care for the first time in almost 50 years. Azar also led key public health initiatives such as banning flavored e-cigarettes and reducing youth tobacco use by nearly one-third in one year, creating and implementing the program to end the HIV epidemic in America in 10 years, preparing for and responding to public health threats, crafting the first rural health initiative to improve access and quality of care, and launching a program to reduce dramatically maternal mortality. Azar has played significant roles on the global health stage, leading many of the U.S.’s global health security efforts, representing the U.S. in the World Health Assembly, working with the WHO to end Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, chairing the most active G7 health ministerial in history in 2020, and convening and leading western hemisphere coordinated efforts to assist with the Venezuelan refugee crisis.
Azar served for five years (2012-2017) as president of Lilly USA, LLC, the largest affiliate of global biopharmaceutical leader Eli Lilly and Company, producing over $10 billion in revenue (2016). Azar previously was vice president of Lilly’s U.S. Managed Healthcare Services and Puerto Rico from 2009-2011. He joined Lilly in 2007 as senior vice president of corporate affairs and communications.
Before his tenure at Lilly, Azar was the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2005-2007), where he was the number two official and chief operating officer. From 2001-2005, he served HHS as General Counsel.
Azar earned a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in government and economics from Dartmouth College in 1988, and a law degree from Yale University in 1991. After law school, he clerked for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Secretary Azar is currently an advisor to Foresite Capital, sits on several corporate boards and advisory boards, is a part-time Adjunct Professor of Business and Senior Executive-in-Residence at the University of Miami Herbert Business School, is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Institute’s Health Strategy Group, the American Task Force On Lebanon’s Policy Advisory Board, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Future of Health Care Advisory Group, the advisory board of the National Institute for Healthcare Management Foundation, and the Healthcare Leadership Council. Azar previously served on the boards of HMS Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: HMSY), the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the Healthcare Leadership Council, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Indianapolis Airport Authority, the American Council on Germany, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.
Alex Azar led the Department of Health and Human Services during some of the most impactful years in the history of public health. Join Secretary Azar as he takes you on a tour of the world through the lens of global public health.
A vivid narrator, Azar will:
Gain insight from a business and government leader who has led some of the most complex and largest organizations on earth through transformational change. Secretary Azar most recently led the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the COVID pandemic and the fundamental restructuring of the American health system. He did so with his learnings and experiences as the longest-serving President of Eli Lilly and Company’s U.S. business. At Lilly, Azar steered the affiliate through the largest relative losses of exclusivity of drugs that any pharmaceutical company had experienced, repeatedly reorganizing and resizing the structure of the entire organization to meet strategic needs, operating goals, and a changing portfolio, reinventing Lilly’s commercial model, even while delivering on the existing model, all while increasing employee engagement to a whopping 88% top-two box score, gaining often industry-leading customer loyalty scores, and delivering above-plan profit, revenue, and operating expense performance each year.
You will hear:
During Alex Azar’s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services, some of the most consequential changes in modern history to how healthcare is delivered and financed in America were put in place. Learn how Secretary Azar worked to change the rules of the road in healthcare to enable a system that puts the patient at the center, removed regulatory distortions in the delivery of healthcare, and for the first time in 55 years created the preconditions for a competitive market for healthcare in which prices go down and quality improves, rather than the other way around.
You will hear:
Hear from the architect of Operation Warp Speed how Secretary Azar combined his extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry with his deep understanding of government programs to create and co-chair the largest and most successful biomedical development program in world history, delivering vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19 within months. Almost everyone said it couldn’t be done. But seven months later, thanks to OWS, the United States had two remarkably safe and effective vaccines with tens of millions of doses and authorized therapeutics to treat COVID. Many attribute its success to good fortune or a “miracle,” but he knows the truth. The success of OWS was a function of exceptional leadership and teamwork, an insightful strategy, and exacting execution. As a result of the vision he articulated and the incredible OWS team he and his co-chair Secretary of Defense Mark Esper assembled, and the efforts of the biopharmaceutical industry, hundreds of millions of Americans were already vaccinated less than one year after OWS was announced.
A gripping raconteur, Azar will:
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