YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Karen DeSalvo

lines on the record: 32
first: 2021-05-13
most recent: 2021-05-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so I think what's at stake is I don't want people to get comfortable again and not remember that we have to help people all around the world. And it feels a little bit selfish to say it, I guess, but what I do hope comes out of this is this ongoing recognition and respect of and love for public health, the public health infrastructure, and that we have to strengthen it, that we have to help it be better at forecasting and tracking because there are significant not only health, but also social and financial consequences if we don't. And we neglected public health for decades, not just in the US, but around the world. And this is a moment when we can restore that critical piece of infrastructure for the whole health ecosystem and make sure that it can be a strong partner to medicine, to the scientific apparatus, and to all other sectors.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big question. I'm going to acknowledge that I've got a Western lens on the world. I think what's at stake is that we become inert, selfish, forgetful of what's happening in other parts of the world from this scourge that is COVID because we'll be protected. There are examples of other diseases where that's happened, but there's also really good examples where the US didn't give up, take HIV. And what we did with Pat Farr and how committed we have been as a country to be a part of a world set of solutions to end that pandemic.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help us. Eventually, it took them too long. And that's, I think, a little bit of our challenge right now, even globally, is if you think about deploying assets to a place like India, people think, well, if we deploy all of our assets to India, then how do we get ahead of protecting other parts of the world? So it's complicated. People are leaning in. They want to help. There are ways that we can be helpful. And certainly at Google, because we have a lot of Googlers in India, we have a lot of Googler families in India. We're paying a lot of attention, but it's also just because it's such a humanitarian crisis.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“X, Y, and Z will happen. People thought, well, there will be public health measures. The peak won't maybe look just quite like this, but it has been an incredible rise in cases and collapse of the systems there in the way that we saw in some other countries already. And there are other parts of the world where COVID has much damage still to do. And there's probably parts of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. who knows what else. And I'm not trying to create a negative frame. I just think for me, this is an example where I'm kind of very in the moment in places like India, but then also trying to get my head about what might come next. You know, I had this, keep talking about Hurricane Katrina. And that was my imprint moment when I had a huge crisis that my community suffered through in New Orleans. And what was for us, everything was like chaos and devastating. Everything collapsed, all of our systems. But people could come.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heavy, if I could be honest, it's really heavy. I live a little bit in the future. And what I mean by that is, I'm constantly thinking about where the epic curves are gonna be and then what we need to be doing four to six weeks or more down the road sometimes means that when people that are experiencing waning of some part of the pandemic, I sort of went through it emotionally and intellectually already and I'm already on to the next piece. The situation in India though I think what's just devastating.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To transmit to someone else, we don't want to give any more opportunity for variants to form that might be resistant to the vaccine. Everybody just take a breath. We're so close in some geographies like the US. Let's get us closer to 75% so that no matter what happens with that last 25%, as many people are protected as possible.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get towards herd immunity. And the reason I keep raising the herd immunity piece is for two big reasons. One, what we got to do is not worry about individuals. We got to figure out what's the population level, right? Because that ultimately is going to protect those people who can't or won't get vaccinated, just like we do with measles, which is incredibly infectious and deadly disease. The other piece of this is, though de minimis, it is still known that you can catch COVID if you've been vaccinated. And I need for a while people to keep that in their head. Yes, you may catch COVID, but because you're vaccinated, not get sick or end up in the hospital. But there's still the chance that you could catch it and transmit it to someone who's immunocompromised or has another reason that it actually might kill them. That's the cautious piece of public health right now that you're feeling where we're saying, look, we're getting there, but we're not there. We don't want any links in the chain. We don't want anyone.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's an important and complex area, and I don't say that lightly. This is an area that we've been doing an awful lot of thinking about. And as a public health person, when I was in the Bomb administration, it happened to be the time of the measles outbreaks. And so vaccine hesitancy was pretty high on our list of things. And in that kind of vaccine hesitancy or lack of herd immunity, there's a set of strategies to normalize vaccines and vaccination. In this context, we've learned we have to do something different. We have to be very outspoken and encouraged the vaccination and have campaigns and really push people to, which is not typically how you handle hesitancy. You try to normalize people not getting vaccinated. This is the flip side, basically. And I think the reality so far is that looking at the numbers in almost any geography around the world, about three quarters of the population wants to get vaccinated. And then if you add children to the mix.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are strongly encouraging people to get vaccinated and doing everything we can to make it easy, setting up sites right now in the US, but we already have been doing this in Europe and in other parts of the world where we can to have this frictionless of possible access to vaccines and a lot of internal campaigning, meaning education about them. But right now we're not mandating. And so encouragement is still our posture. We have a lot of good uptake, actually. A lot of employees pretty interested in getting vaccinated. That's a good demand.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very last mile to give people who are unsure, unclear, need more information, all of the answers that they need. I think it's a little early to start to tear up the society. I think the reality is that to travel to countries in some parts of the world, you do need to show proof of vaccination. Ethics and privacy and legal aside, there's a public health reality that I think some countries will get to where they need to know that just as they'll want to know you had your yellow fever vaccination, right, they're going to want to know that you had your COVID vaccination”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prefer actually just a record of your vaccination, to be honest. I mean, I'm just a doctor at heart. I just want to know if you got your vaccine. And I want to know if you got your flu shot and when was your last tetanus vaccine? I mean, my primary care doc and that's our bread and butter as part of your preventive care. And COVID may turn out to be another one that I have to make sure that you're getting regularly. People should be able to keep a record. I spent a lot of my career making sure people had access to their personal health information. You can imagine feed's right in. I want people to be able to very easily if you download, store, share their health information, including if they got a vaccine. The worries about equity and discrimination are real. And I think until we have much more widespread availability of vaccines, not just in rich Western countries, but globally, until we understand or have taken the efforts to really go that way.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“influenza or died from it. As many as 50,000 people in the US could die from influenza a year. And we had less than a couple of hundred people that ended up getting documented influenza. That's a lot of lives saved because we washed our hands and we wore masks and we distanced. I'm not saying that we should live like this all the time in a bubble. On the other hand, it's a good reminder that, boy, if we could get more people to get a flu shot, if we could stay home when we're sick, if we could follow some of these things, we could actually save a lot of people's and babies lives in the future.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I haven't been to a restaurant since February of 2020. That's my sense of risk. But I know lots of people are different on the spectrum. So it will continue to evolve. And I think a lot about my experience after Hurricane Katrina, when in the beginning, I'd say it probably lasted about five years. Nobody was rebuilding their basements. They were just going to leave it as cement because it was going to flood again. People were raising or tearing down houses that were flushed to the ground so they could build up. There's all this fear and concern from the flooding that people didn't want to experience that again. But boy, you know, 15 years later, people are building flat on the ground. They're building out those basements. We're humans, right? I know people are going to back off from their sense of fear, but what I would hope is that some part of us take a really hard look at this other thing that happened last year, Bob, which is that hardly anybody got”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is such an interesting question for me. The thing about COVID is it hit the whole world really hard and it didn't just hit us medically, it hit us financially and socially every second of every day, every second of every day there's a visual, a data point, a story that you can see on social media or on 24-hour news channel. We didn't have that in 1918, right? It's in our consciousness all the time. And so of course it's created a lot of anxiety and fear, which sometimes in the pandemic caused people to be incredibly helpful in flattening the curve, right? And or being part of the solution. But people can't live in fear all the time, right? So then I think it's just clear that people are going to want to start to adjust their own risk. Everybody's going through that experience.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Swiss cheese model that's running around the internet a lot. Basically, we think about this as what are all the places that we want to interrupt transmission, right? And so as we're thinking of bringing them back in in places like the US, it's those layers that are really about reducing harm over time. Our workforce is going to be a little different. My husband's still actively practicing medicine and he's at ER doc. So he's been in the mix for the whole pandemic and he's had a completely different work experience. I've been in my living room by myself staring at a screen. He's been masked up in many parts of this wearing full PPE to go to work. The reason I share that is even in my own family, there's not a single answer to what RTO looks like. I think all of us just have to be thinking about harm reduction, personal risk, and I would hope that companies are thinking like we are, but what is the thing we can do to not be a link in the chain of transmission?”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us as a company, by and large we can work from home, so we have. That was an early decision that we made and we're proud of it. And we have maintained a pretty, I'd call it conservative posture about that throughout the pandemic, really cautiously watching. And some of that is because we certainly have offices in parts of Asia. And so we have a little bit of a forecasting or a future tense view there where we have workforce and offices in can see how the pandemic is volatile. It isn't until recently where there's more vaccination availability that we're seeing that start to stabilize some in places. Now, we also have people go into the office. We have data centers, we have content moderation sites, we have places all around the world where thousands and thousands of Googlers and contractors have been working. And so we've also learned, like many places, how to add layers of safety. People might have seen”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, definitely. This is one of the big lessons we've learned in the pandemic, we're pretty good at looking in the rearview mirror and saying, wow, two years ago, a lot of people were dying. That's the state of public health information. What technology companies have gotten quite good at is forecasting. This is how the world might look into the future. And to marrying up the data integrity and scientific expertise of, say, the public health infrastructure with the methodologic and data expertise of the technology sector has been pretty exciting throughout the pandemic. As a public health person communications job one, I'm pretty sure still. Job two, data. Because you got to make evidence-based decisions, but we can't do it on data that's two years old.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it leverages the opportunity of learning. And in the health IT world, we talk a lot about learning health systems. This is an example of that. So technology is helping to accelerate and augment what a call system or a system might see in the data. It also helps to visualize it, to triage it, and to amplify the kinds of next steps that need to be taken to make sure you're meeting the population's needs.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, this is a tool that supports public health and governments so that they can not only help their populations find and access vaccines, but then it creates a virtuous loop so that those governments, those public health agencies and in some cases healthcare systems can see what. Between our public health teams and our cloud teams and our government affairs teams, people can come together and say, well, here's a problem that we're hearing about that we need to solve.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to maybe contract with some talent who can really help us realize that we have somebody on our team already who's they're at basically a world's expert in vaccine hesitancy. Now they're on doing something else. I was brought in to execute on this vision. It's really gotten to be bigger in scope than we had originally imagined.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full on credit to people who were here standing up this idea that Google has many ways that it can apply its technologies to improve healthcare and health globally. That led to the formation of Google Health, which David Feinberger was recruited to run, and then David in turn recruited me. And there are already some clinicians here at Google. I think the reality of the talent here, just to give you a sense, I mean, we have people who were former FDA commissioners, people who are expert in clinical trials or they're physicians that are also AI scientists or nurses who have been at the bedside but also led big health systems. So when we have a challenge to face and I say, can anyone raise their hand if we already have in-house a lot of talent we've built on that team where we knew that we needed to grow? I'm going to give you a very specific example. We were thinking about vaccine hesitancy.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess yes, my life experiences and my training are a good match for what we needed to do here. But no, I would not want this to happen ever again. There's all this other underlying health and financial and social challenge that have been brought forward by this pandemic. So I would have much preferred that we all just figured out on our own how important equity is and having anti-racist systems and how valuable public health is and how much community matters and we should help each other without having to go through all this suffering, honestly.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if everyone knows what a doodle is, but a doodle is when you go to google.com and you see the letters there, the Google letters, we can make them into things that are educational. We had one that was celebrating public health and physicians and a bunch of other essential frontline workers. This was last year. We've just had one last weekend on vaccines. We have one on masking. As a public health person, again, I'll be honest, we're terrible at messaging and creatives. It's like notoriously eat your vegetables, walk further, and it doesn't really resonate. You can talk to these creative folks who make the doodle as an example, and they'll take that idea and turn it into an engaging, entertaining cartoon that still gives you all the message about mask and distance and how we're all in this together.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are I mentioned that I was health commissioner in New Orleans and I had this contrasting sense of when you're a local public health official, you're trying to get good information out to the public, the water's unsafe to drink, the water's safe to drink, there's a fire. So if you have asthma, be careful today. And so you're on local news and radio. And honestly, hardly anyone's paying attention to you. It's so hard to push information out to the public and then contrast that with being at Google where everybody's coming to you to look for information all over the world. And so marrying the pull from the public with the push from public health is a great joy for me, actually, because I have a lot of friends in colleagues in public health. And the more we can do to be their megaphone, to get that great authoritative information out, the better it is. I also have learned a lot about the talent of our creative people here at Google. And there's a few doodles, for example, that we've created.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're able to put that on the landing page in what we call an OSERP, like a way that we can create kind of a knowledge area or how we can work with Tony Fauci to create good content for YouTube in partnership with Trevor Noah or others. There's, I think, the reality for me that we have a responsibility, but also a lot of opportunity, and it takes a lot of intentionality to get there.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, when I saw the news report about standing up screening at the airports in the US, I went to the search bar and I searched on coronavirus. CDC and what popped up were the old coronavirus sites from the CDC that led me to reaching out to the search team and saying, is this on your radar? What are we doing to get better information? And how can we help the CDC know that they need to get a new page because this is not SARS or MERS or any of the other coronaviruses that affect the world we need to push this information front and center? As a person who didn't work at Google, I didn't think much about it. And now I understand that, first of all, we're this amplifier of public health information and see how we have this huge responsibility to help get the right information forward and that it takes a lot of intentionality. And now a lot of my team in partnership with engineers and others to see that when the CDC has new information or the National Health Service.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. I came in to do this externally facing product stewardship work for consumers and clinicians and the role that has been added is this role of employee health and safety all around the world. It's more than I thought I was coming to do. I absolutely love it. And I love the way the company thinks about as the community goes we go. So it's a very balanced perspective of the information we want to share with the public is just what we want to share with employees, our expectations about data and science, et cetera, are very aligned.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was in London in January and I was ready to come back to the US and I saw a report that the CDC and the public health service were setting up screening for COVID in the airports in the US. Ebola, that was my team's role. I ran the public health service. So we had to stand up screening in airports. And I knew how serious of a decision that is on the part of the U.S. government to stand up a screening like that. From there, we began to really think about how we could be helpful.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My background, Bob, is practice medicine, top medicine, did research, you know, very traditional academic career in medicine. But I also had a career in public health, including being a health commissioner in New Orleans and then in the federal government. So the chance to come to a place like Google, which has this platform of incredible technology and people talented at applying AI to solve the world's big problems. And Mary, my background in medicine and public health with that was going to be very exciting. We were thinking a lot about two big paths. One, how do we build tools that give clinicians superpowers to do their work better, smarter, faster, cheaper? And how do we give consumers superpowers so that when they're looking for information, it's super high quality and helps them navigate as they're thinking about next best steps? The pandemic accelerated that work, quite honestly. I knew that things were going to be serious.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as you say, on the good, in places like the US, where we have access to highly effective vaccines, we are on a great pathway to getting back to some sense of normalcy by the summer. Though I'm glad you mentioned India because it's such a stark reminder that it's a global pandemic. As the world goes, all of us go. So we have got to make sure we're not only taking care of ourselves, our neighbors, but we're also thinking about the fact that this is a highly infectious virus. And when people let up their guard, it has a real opportunity not only to spread, but also to cause a lot of suffering and then also mutate. So there's lots of reason that we have to be thinking globally, but I don't want to take away from people's sense of relief that if”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology companies have gotten quite good at forecasting. This is how the world might look into the future. And to marrying up the data integrity and scientific expertise of, say, the public health infrastructure with the methodologic and data expertise of the technology sector has been pretty exciting throughout the pandemic. In places like the US, we have access to highly effective vaccines. We are on a great pathway to getting back to some sense of normalcy by the summer. You look at India because it's such a stark reminder that it's a global pandemic. And as the world goes, all of us go.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life experiences and my training are a good match for what we needed to do here. But no, I would not want this to happen ever again. Went to the search bar and I searched on coronavirus. And what popped up were the old coronavirus sites from the CDC that led me to reaching out to the search team and saying, how can we help the CDC know that they need to get a new page because this is not SARS or MERS or any of the other coronaviruses that affect the world? We need to push this information front and center.”
2021-05-13 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT