Episode 5 - Leadership Lessons from the Frontlines of the Pandemic with Aurélia Nguyen, Managing Director Office of the COVAX Facility

How does someone who started out in finance end up center stage in the fight against COVID-19? Because our guest Aurélia Nguyen had the guts and self-awareness to step out of traditional trajectories into a career that, at the time, didn’t even have a name yet. As she progressed through the finance and policy departments at Glaxo Smith Kline, Aurélia realized she had more resonant work to do. So she retrained and redefined herself for her role today: Managing Director of the Office of the COVAX Facility, where she helps secure and distribute COVID-19 vaccines to 92+ lower-resource countries – a job description that’s about as high-stakes and high-speed as it gets.

We talk with Aurélia about how she’s learned to successfully lead in an environment where there are many players, objectives, realities, and pivots (sound familiar?). We talk about collaboration, working toward collective milestones rather than collective visions, gathering talented teams who work with a singular focus, and how extending partnership arcs far outside the health category is helping her team reach their global health mission. It’s a powerful story of redefining and the incredible impact it can have on the world.

Review the following relevant report: What if they mean it?

How does someone who started out in finance end up center stage in the fight against COVID-19? As our guest Aurélia Nguyen progressed through the finance and policy departments at GlaxoSmithKline, she realized she had more resonant work to do. So she retrained and redefined herself for her role today: Managing Director of the Office of the COVAX Facility, where she helps secure and distribute COVID-19 vaccines to 92+ lower-resource countries.

We talk with Aurélia about how she’s learned to successfully lead in an environment with many players and priorities, working toward collective milestones rather than collective visions, gathering talented teams who work with a singular focus, and how extending partnerships outside the health category is helping her team reach their global mission.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear from Aurélia in this episode (edited for length and clarity):

Aurélia’s Redefiner Moment: From finance to global health 
I had parents that worked in a bank, so I was trying to follow what I thought was a dutiful pathway. But very quickly I realized that although I enjoyed the technical skills of finance, it was really my fascination for the impact act of medicines and vaccines and this equity question around access to medicines in developing countries that was driving everything that I was doing.

And so over time within pharma, I retrained: I did a master's, and then that led me to switch over from the private sector in the pharma industry to the GAVI Alliance. I was moving into a career which didn't really even have a name at the time. The work that I started doing is called market shaping: how to apply commercial forces to access to vaccines. So I think that was probably a key moment.

On how private sector leaders can contribute to social good
Focus on what you do best, and then how that can be built to serve a broader social goal. It's about how one is able to use the core business to contribute and to maybe redefine some of the business models that have been used over time.

There was clearly a market failure where pharma companies were not developing vaccines with the developing world in mind, or the vaccines were completely unaffordable. And it was really about turning that proposition around to say, how can this be part of the core business model? Because vaccines in the developing world bring a large volume. It may not be as profitable as other segments, but it helps ensure visibility and predictability for production of vaccines, which is an extremely long process. That has value, though it may be a different value.

On other applications of the global vaccine infrastructure
We've used the partners of COVAX—WHO, CEPI, GAVI, also UNICEF—who have the knowledge around vaccines to create an end-to-end solution, if you like, from vaccine R&D through to delivery. Beyond health itself, this model of partnership could be applied to some of the other big problems that the globe is facing. We've had really interesting partnerships using things like blockchain technology to ensure data integrity. We're looking at using satellite imagery to identify communities who may not be mapped in official systems. So there's so many other aspects, I think, that we can build on to help strengthen health systems overall beyond a pandemic setting.

Aurélia Nguyen
Managing Director Office of the COVAX Facility

In October 2020, Aurélia Nguyen was appointed Managing Director of the Office of the COVAX Facility. In this role, Aurélia is leading the coordination of procurement and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines for 190 participating economies through COVAX, the only global initiative that is working with governments and manufacturers worldwide to ensure fair and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for economies of all financial means. COVAX is the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a groundbreaking global collaboration bringing together governments, scientists, businesses, civil society, donors, and global health organizations to speed up an end to the pandemic. Until her appointment as Managing Director of the Office of the COVAX Facility, Aurélia served as Gavi’s Managing Director for Vaccines & Sustainability, leading the end-to-end work of designing Gavi’s vaccine programs. She and her team were responsible for designing ways for Gavi’s resources to support financially sustainable vaccine programs and markets, and ultimately increase uptake of life-saving vaccines.

Prior to joining Gavi, Aurélia held a variety of posts between 1999 and 2010 within GlaxoSmithKline, where latterly she led the development of GSK’s policies on access to medicines and vaccines in the developing world. She has also undertaken research for the World Health Organization (WHO) on generic medicines policies. Aurélia is a certified accountant and holds a Master’s degree in Health Policy, Planning & Financing from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the London School of Economics. Aurélia was named by TIME magazine to the 2021 TIME100 Next list honoring “the 100 individuals who are shaping the future of their fields and defining the next generation of leadership”.