KOLOA, Kauai–Credit unions know something about risk. But not the kind of risk where when wrong choices are made the results are “you get your head chopped off” or, worse, people die.
Those are the kinds of risks Dr. Charity Dean talked to credit unions about, sharing a perspective from outside the industry but addressing an issue leaders inside the industry (and all industries) are quite familiar with: the COVID pandemic.
Dean is the founder/ CEO of The Public Health Company, a start-up that is seeking to develop the first global biosecurity platform to offer enterprises a SaaS-enabled service for the management of bio-risks. Prior to that, in the lead up to the COVID pandemic, Dean was an assistant director for the California Department of Public Health and a key member of the executive team directing the COVID-19 response.
In 2019, Charity served as acting state public health officer, leading California’s response to complex outbreaks, disasters, environmental risks, and bioterrorism events. From 2011 to 2018, she served as the public health officer for Santa Barbara County, and also served as attending physician for TB, HIV and homeless medicine at the Santa Barbara Health Care Centers.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Oregon State University and a Doctor of Medicine and Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine from Tulane University.
Dean is among those featured in the new Michael Lewis book, “The Premonition,” which Universal is now making into a movie.
‘Contextualized Risk Management’
In remarks to Co-op Solutions’ CEO Conference, she said her two decades in public health really came down to “contextualized risk management.”
Dean said she wanted to be a doctor from age seven and specifically wanted to specialize in communicable diseases. She recalled she even made Styrofoam models of viruses and hung them in her childhood room.
In responding to highly infectious diseases, she said the critical lesson she learned was, “Data is messy. Intelligence is what’s important.”
And yet the intelligence can be murky and obviously involves risks in making decisions. The job of a public health official, she said, can be described as, “If you’re wrong, you get your head chopped off. If you’re right, nobody knows.”
The Reality
“The reality of the world we live in is there are pathogens we know and love, like bubonic plague and HIV, but the world had changed and interaction with animals has created zoonotic diseases, and now international travel means diseases do not require eight months to get to the United States, it's eight hours,” she said.
Dean shared that in December 2019 she began to pay attention to “sketchy” information on social media and “sketchy news outlets from China that were taken down,” and her “index of suspicion” began to grow.
“In 2020, we were making assumptions about the pathogens and with just simple math we could see this was a mathematical inevitability. This was a pandemic,” she said.
But the challenge was and remains, she said, “In bio-health, there is no way to make the invisible visible.”
In early 2020 Dean said she was flown by Blackhawk helicopter to meet the Grand Princess cruise ship on which the first Covid cases were being reported among Americans.
“At that point we knew this was likely airborne. We also suspected fecal particles,” she told the meeting.”
At the dock she also noticed the port-a-potties were all lined up in a row and were supposed to be used by sick passengers and health care providers alike. That required a change, she said to laughter from the room.
The Wolverines
Dean said she eventually was contacted by a group of medical and disease experts who call themselves the “Wolverines” (named for the 1984 Patrick Swayze movie “Red Dawn”), who were attempting to work behind the scenes with the White House as the COVID pandemic began to spread in the country. The group continues to meet weekly on issues of public health.
It was during that work and during the early months of the pandemic when Dean shared learned of the challenges to CEOs and governors in attempting to “cobbling and duct-taping together a response.”
“There was no way to assess when the risk hits the threshold on when to make a decision,” she said. “We knew the capability the United States needed and that enterprises needed didn’t exist to protect the United States, the economy. The threats we face in a new world is very relevant to enterprises. We should not be putting CEOs and governors in the position of having to choose between health and the economy.”
The ability to make fast decisions early when the data is still scattered can save the country a “massive amount of economic impact down the road,” according to Dean.
Data Will Never be Perfect
“When you are facing a novel threat, you’re never going to have the prefect data,” said Dean. “The gamification of risk is about giving decision-makers the right data at their fingertips to act fast. States didn’t have that; the federal government didn’t have that. I’m reading articles on my iPhone looking for any sort of intelligence that exists. Whiteboarding became my superpower because an intelligence platform didn’t exist.”
Dean said the state of California, “to its great credit,” tapped a resource unique to the Golden State: Silicon Valley. Being exposed to the “smartest technologists” also opened her eyes.
“I had expected to be a public servant my whole life, but I was starting to conclude government can’t fix this, but capitalism might.”
Launch of New Company
To provide C-suite execs with better tools on responding to bio-risks, she left government and became founder and CEO of The Public Health Company, which aims to provide those tools.
What finally got her to leave the public sector, she said, was being asked, “If someone is going to build this shouldn’t it be a local health officer?”
“I knew the kind of trust and integrity it would take,” said Dean. “CEOs had lost that kind of trust in the public institutions they thought would come and save them. People didn’t know who to trust anymore. They feared some of the information coming out of the health agencies was politically influenced. Every public health official is a political appointee.”
Two “Sure” Lessons
During her career journey, Dean said there are two things she has come to know “for sure”:
- There is no shortcut to courage and integrity. “I only become brave and have integrity by making those hard, brave decisions over and over.”
- Star Wars is the accurate metaphor for launching anything in Silicon Valley, where one can find the force, the dark side, the Jedi and the resistance fighters.
Frightening Final Thought
There is one other thing Dean said she knows, and it’s frightening.
“One of the things that worries me the most about the COVID 19 pandemic is that our adversaries learned the potential for manufactured pathogens is very real today,” Dean said. “They see the ability to disrupt the U.S. economy and the economies of democracies with an airborne pathogen and what that can do when you combine political misinformation and people’s behaviors.”
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