One of the “fringe benefits” of the modern presidency is being roasted on Saturday Night Live. I generally got a kick out of the show’s portrayals of me by Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond. One of my favorites was the skit in which I ended one of my Washington, D.C., jogs at a fast-food restaurant, where I proceeded to explain my policy decisions to patrons while swiping French fries from their trays.
It was funny because there was some truth to it: I started running in law school when Hillary urged me to. I ran five or six days a week after going home to Arkansas, three miles a day during the week, often longer on the weekend. I kept it up in Washington, usually running right out of the White House to the Mall, then up to the Capitol or down on the Potomac. I also ran at Fort McNair or West Potomac Park, which the Secret Service preferred because they were easier to secure. But I preferred the Mall. It was quicker and gave me the chance to talk to interesting people, from members of Congress to visiting tourists.
Two things happened to change that. In October 1994, a man came from Colorado and sprayed the White House with bullets to protest the recently passed Crime Bill’s ban on assault weapons like the one he was using. After that the Secret Service pleaded with me to give up running in the open, saying they couldn’t protect me with fifty agents. So it was down to Fort McNair and West Potomac Park, which, depending on traffic, would add twenty to thirty minutes to the running time. Then, in March 1997, after running three miles, doing fifty pushups, and playing golf, I tripped on the steps outside Greg Norman’s house in Jupiter, Florida, fell backward trying to regain my balance, and tore 90 percent of my right quadriceps. It hurt like the devil and the recovery took months, but thanks to two fine U.S. Navy physical therapists, my leg recovered. I actually lost weight using an upper body cycle, and then, when I was able, swimming up to a mile a day.
But I never really changed my traditional Southern diet or checked my love of the wonderful creations of the White House dessert chef, the late Roland Mesnier. So when I left the White House, I had a high cholesterol count and was taking medicine to keep those numbers in check. In 2001, I started jogging again but found I couldn’t run much more than a half mile without slowing to walk a couple of hundred yards, then picking up the pace again. Although I lost a fair amount of weight in a hurry and was in better shape by Chelsea’s graduation from Stanford in the spring, I still couldn’t cover much distance without stopping. By early 2004, even on treadmills or walks in the woods, I’d often have to stop on steep inclines, catch my breath, then go on. I thought the cause was exhaustion from the long hours spent to finish My Life by the publisher’s deadline, but I was in for a rude awakening: the decades of poor eating and family genetics had caught up with me.
For the last months of 2004, I had a full schedule planned, including stumping for Senator John Kerry’s bid for the White House and the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center. In late August, Hillary was already headed to the New York State Fair in upstate Syracuse, an annual tradition since her 2000 Senate campaign, and I was looking forward to joining her, the one thing she asked me to do as her Senate spouse, because I knew a lot about farming and rural development, had visited countless county and state fairs, and loved being with people who made their living directly and indirectly from the land.
Then, on September 1, as I got off the plane after a trip to New Orleans promoting My Life, including a big Louisiana meal, I felt a tightness in my chest. It was the first time it happened when I hadn’t been walking in the hills near our house with Hillary, or on the treadmill at a steep incline. I wasn’t overly concerned because a recent checkup at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix showed my cholesterol levels had improved, although the examination also showed I had enough calcium buildup around my heart to put me in the top third of people at risk.
I called our family doctor, Lisa Bardack, the next morning and she advised me to get a treadmill stress test at a small clinic near our home. The test showed no signs of a cardiac event. Nevertheless, the doctors urged me to get an angiogram, which would look for blockages of the major coronary arteries, the leading cause of heart attacks, by injecting dye into the bloodstream and imaging the resulting blood flow to the heart.
Early the next morning I drove to get the test after calling Hillary to say that I’d join her at the State Fair as soon as the angiogram cleared me. It was not to be. The imaging showed blockage in all four of my major coronary arteries, two of them at 90 percent. While I had not had a heart attack, I’d come about as close as a person could. Although the physicals didn’t pick it up, given my inability to run distances, I’d probably had some blockage since 2001, or before.
With blockages this severe, bypass surgery was the only option, and it needed to be done without delay. Instead of going to the State Fair, I was taken directly to New York Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan, not far from my Harlem office, and was soon joined by Hillary. Chelsea, who was in Paris at the time, came as quickly as she could.
After the news became public, I received thousands of encouraging messages from friends, colleagues, and folks from all over the country and the world. I was also grateful to see that the news coverage included some much needed information about heart disease prevention and cardiac care. My surgery, while serious and not without risk, is quite commonplace in the United States, performed several hundred thousand times a year. I was hopeful that people taking an interest in my case would examine their own health and that those who needed to would take preventive steps or seek treatment before it was too late.
The surgery was performed on September 6 by Dr. Craig Smith, a gifted cardiac surgeon whose skill and calm demeanor were a blessing to me and my family. In 2020, when the coronavirus engulfed New York and filled its hospitals, Craig Smith was the chief surgeon at New York Presbyterian. He wrote a series of updates to the staff, designed both to inform and inspire them. Full of literary and historical allusions, powerful writing, and deep humanity, they are works of art that will be read a hundred years from now. You can read some of them in his memoir, Nobility in Small Things: A Surgeon’s Path. It’s honest, chronicling both his successes and failures while praising his colleagues, and is beautifully written.
What I most remember while going under anesthesia was a swirl of images, first of dark faces like death masks, which flew at me, were crushed, then were followed by circles of light containing the faces of Hillary and Chelsea and others I loved, which also flew toward me before floating off into a bright light not unlike the sun. What this meant, if anything, about my own mortality I don’t know. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I didn’t think my work here on earth was finished just yet, and I wanted to be around to support Hillary and Chelsea in whatever way I could. They were with me as I came out from under the anesthesia in the early afternoon in good spirits. Hillary said later that I looked so peaceful, with not a line on my face, as if I’d had the first restful sleep in more than thirty years.
And so began my recovery, including what eventually became a different and much more healthy relationship with food. I had an amazing medical team, led by my cardiologist, Dr. Alan Schwartz, a brilliant, dedicated man who practices what he preaches. He’s almost as old as I am, still runs thirty miles a week, and when I gain weight tells me I have to eat less and move more. Dr. Bardack put up with my complaints about the regular blood drawings to make sure all was going as planned. Both doctors are still with me in spite of my occasional resistance to their entreaties. They’ve kept me going for twenty precious years I’ve shared with family, friends, and work that all keep me hungry for more life.
The first days and weeks were painful as my body recuperated, and I started slow walks. I especially appreciated the advice and fellowship of others who had gone through the same or similar procedures, and was grateful for the frank advice and specific guidance on how to make sure I didn’t revert to bad habits. Many people told me they were sad and frightened for a few days after their surgeries, even breaking into tears. That didn’t happen to me. Because of my family history, I benefited from a long acquaintance with my own mortality, was glad to have another chance at life, and enjoyed the extended time to read, listen to music, and watch movies and sports, especially the baseball playoffs and the World Series. By early November I was in good enough shape to do a couple of campaign stops with John Kerry, including a large rally in Philadelphia, and a few weeks after the election, to welcome thousands of well-wishers to the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center and Library in Little Rock.
The surgery was by all measures a success, but I had to have two more procedures in the next five years. About 10 percent of those who have bypass surgery have fluid buildup around the lungs, and about 10 percent of those don’t lose the fluid on their own. I was one of the unlucky one percent. The fluid contains a pulpy substance which settles into a rind that holds the fluid in and impairs lung function. I had it checked when I noticed difficulty on longer walks on steep inclines. In 2005, Dr. Josh Sonett pried open my ribs to create enough space to reach the rind, pare it away, and let the fluid drain away from my lungs.
Then, in February 2010, as I was about to leave on an overseas trip, I noticed my coloring was paler than usual. I called Dr. Schwartz, who said, “I think you dropped a vein. It’s no big deal but you need to go get it fixed now.” It’s a fairly common occurrence, because veins used in modern bypass surgeries are thinner and weaker than arteries. So I went back to the hospital to have two titanium mesh stents inserted to open one of my blocked arteries. The doctor gave me the option of anesthesia or staying awake and watching the procedure on a screen near my head. “I’m not going to die, am I?” I asked. “No,” he replied. “Then I want to watch.” It was fascinating, and I skipped the postoperative anesthesia hangover.
Although what happened was not life-threatening, I finally realized that no amount of exercise could rid my body of its vulnerability to bad cholesterol and its consequences. So, with the help of Hillary and my longtime aide Oscar Flores, who had served on the Navy staff in the White House Mess before joining us in Chappaqua, I finally adopted a mostly plant-based, dairy-free diet.
Besides my recovery and my new relationship to food, the most positive outcome of my heart incident began with an outreach from Cass Wheeler, the president of the American Heart Association (AHA). Cass asked me if I would consider using what happened to me as a teachable moment for America, in particular for our kids. Because of the Saturday Night Live routines and other things, he said, only half joking, that I was the “poster child for bad eating habits.” He thought that if I got together with the Heart Association in promoting heart health, we could make significant progress in fighting the high and still growing rate of obesity in America’s young people, which until the explosion of the opioid epidemic, was our number one public health problem.
More and more children were reporting high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes, which had formerly been found mainly in adults. Obesity-related annual hospital costs for children had more than tripled between 1979 and 1999, and overweight children and adolescents had an approximately 70 percent chance of becoming overweight adults, increasing their risk for heart disease or other conditions leading to a lower overall life expectancy. This last statistic rang true to me, as I had more or less kept the eating habits I had developed as a chubby boy, with all of the health risks they entailed.
We had tried to address this looming epidemic during my administration as part of the overall healthcare reform effort, and when that was defeated, as part of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, which provided healthcare to millions of children in the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicaid was enacted in 1965. I wanted to help, but not by just making public service announcements or talking about my own experience. That was fine, but America needed a long-term commitment to changing not only children’s lifestyles and diets, but also changing the business practices that made it too easy for kids—and profitable for companies—to make unhealthy choices, even in their schools. To do that, the schools, the food and beverage industries, healthcare providers and insurers, the media, and the entertainment industry had to join the effort.
In May of 2005, eight months after my bypass surgery, the Clinton Foundation joined forces with the AHA to launch what would become the Alliance for a Healthier Generation at Public School 128 in New York City. I asked Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to serve as a cochairman because he had developed an aggressive effort to combat childhood obesity in the schools of our home state, and had lost a lot of weight himself to encourage others. Governor Huckabee and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who took over for him in 2007, were both Republicans, and their early involvement forged a bipartisan relationship with state governors that became a valuable part of the alliance’s ongoing work. The alliance hit the ground running and developed good vehicles for reaching young people, including Nickelodeon’s award-winning show Let’s Just Play, which featured kids engaging in healthy activities.
In 2006, aided by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the alliance instituted the Healthy Schools Program, which became a pillar of our work, with clear goals for participating schools: improving the nutritional value of food and drinks served in and out of cafeterias and vending machines; increasing physical activity during and after the school day; providing classroom lessons on healthy lifestyles; and promoting school staff wellness. The first year’s goal was 200 participating schools. By 2007, that number had risen to 1,000. At last count, the Healthy Schools Program has helped 30.8 million children in 52,000 schools, districts, and out-of-school sites, building healthier places of learning, and expanding that work to the larger community.
For several years, we held an annual meeting at the Clinton Presidential Center to honor schools we recognized for outstanding progress in school nutrition and exercise programs. Hardworking educators from all over the country were recognized for advancing the health of their students and staff. At one meeting we featured a thirteen-year-old refugee from Katrina who had relocated to Little Rock, lost thirty-six pounds, and inspired his mother to do the same!
Perhaps our most significant accomplishment was a partnership with beverage companies to provide healthier alternatives to the drinks supplied to school cafeterias and vending machines. This was a very profitable area for the companies, so the challenge was to find a way for them to help the kids and still make money.
Led by Pepsi, Coke, Cadbury Schweppes, and the American Beverage Association, the companies agreed to switch their offerings in thousands of schools from high-sugar drinks to alternatives like flavored waters, diet soda, fat-free milk, and less sugary fruit juices. By 2010, full-calorie beverages had been removed from all the participating schools, and total calories from all drinks shipped to schools had dropped by 90 percent. The companies were still making a profit, and their youngest customers were much better off.
We tried and still try to do the same thing with snack foods, but with less success, partly because the snacks providers are more numerous and less well organized. We had more success in reducing the calories and increasing the nutritional value of food provided by contractors to schools that no longer prepared meals in the cafeteria. Later, as we focused on out-of-school eating, McDonald’s made changes to its Happy Meal program to cut fat and sugar in those items that are primarily eaten by children and increased offerings of fresh fruit and salad. Since then, about five and a half billion servings of fruit, low-fat dairy drinks, and water have been sold in Happy Meals.
We still need to do more. In recent years the alliance has expanded the Healthy Schools Program to include juvenile justice facilities, tackling stress and trauma in classrooms, and promoting healthier out-of-school time. We’ve also had some success in getting insurance companies to include coverage of visits to doctors and dietitians for overweight children of their employees. In 2017, the alliance spoke out against the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back school nutrition standards, garnering more than 98 million media impressions through placements on MSNBC, National Public Radio, Healthline, and many more. We also participated in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, one of the efforts she made as first lady to get kids and their families to eat healthier and exercise more.
On February 19, 2017, when I was seventy years and six months old, I became the longest-living person in my family for three generations, since my great-grandparents. They lived out in the country, went to bed with the sun, got up with the sun, ate sparingly, and didn’t drink or smoke. I never saw my great-grandfather out of overalls and hobnail boots, or my great-grandmother in anything but simple cotton or wool clothes. Our world is very different from the one they lived in. It has brought us many benefits including medical advancements like the ones that saved my life, but if we’re going to build a healthy society, we need to help our children make good choices while they’re still young enough to create healthy habits for life.
And as for us adults, it’s never too late to make healthier decisions about diet and exercise. If I can do it, anyone can.
I first met Bob Hope in Arkansas as a young governor when he came to do a show at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He was in his late seventies, still busy and as funny as ever. I asked him how he stayed in such great shape and had the energy to maintain his schedule. He told me that as he had gotten older, he made sure to walk for an hour a day, every day. If he finished a show at 11 p.m. and hadn’t walked, he’d do it then, and no matter the weather. He always traveled with rubber boots and a big umbrella.
In February of 1995, during my first term as president, I played golf with President Ford and President George H. W. Bush in the Bob Hope Desert Classic near Palm Springs. The tournament raised money for local charities, most importantly the Eisenhower Medical Center, which was built with funds from the event. Bob, then ninety-one, played a dozen holes with us, could still swing his driver parallel to the ground, and that day hit the ball much straighter than the three presidents did! A few years later, he called to say he was coming to Washington and asked me to take him to play nine holes. At ninety-four, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, he still made par on a 173-yard uphill hole, missing a birdie by less than six inches. I wasn’t a bit surprised when he lived to be one hundred.
In 2012, I was intrigued when a longtime friend, Tim Finchem, then the commissioner of the PGA, contacted me to see if the Clinton Foundation would serve as cohost of the 2012 Bob Hope Desert Classic. Bob had passed away nearly a decade before. Without his presence, with television viewing habits changing, and with competition from a new tournament in the Middle East which paid some players just to come, the tournament had to change to survive and continue its support of the local hospital. I agreed and our team, skillfully guided by Terry Krinvic and Hannah Richert, embraced the challenge and dove in.
In 2012, the PGA reduced play from five to the standard four days, with amateurs playing just the first two days, but the organizers wanted to keep the emphasis on health with the Humana insurance corporation and its CEO, Mike McCallister, as lead sponsor. McCallister was familiar with our work fighting HIV/AIDS in the developing world and addressing childhood obesity at home, and strongly supported the Clinton Foundation’s getting involved and providing a day of health-related programming alongside the golfing. The foundation cohosted the Humana Challenge for the next four years.
It was a big success in its new format, with a good mix of young and veteran pros and celebrity players. I still enjoyed golf and was grateful for the chance to help save Bob Hope’s tournament and to advance our health agenda.
We held the health and wellness summit on the Tuesday before the golf started. Health Matters: Activating Wellness in Every Generation was a fitting tribute to Bob and his lifelong dedication to his own health and to raising money for the Desert Classic Charities organization, which supported health and wellness in the surrounding Coachella Valley. The event brought together more than two hundred stakeholders from healthcare, public policy, business, education, individual wellness, and sports to identify strategies to promote and improve individual healthy lifestyles in the home, the community, and the workplace.
We wanted to stress how entire communities could create better health outcomes for families across the economic spectrum, and the Coachella Valley was a perfect microcosm. Some of California’s poorest and wealthiest families live there. It had the resources and will to improve public health. I was especially impressed by Dr. Raul Ruiz, the son of Coachella farmworkers who earned his medical degree and degrees in Public Health and Public Policy at Harvard. He then came home to work as an emergency room doctor at the Eisenhower Medical Center and also helped open a free clinic for underserved communities in the valley. In 2010, he started the Coachella Valley Healthcare Initiative, bringing all the stakeholders together to address the crisis in local healthcare. It became the model for the work we would do in other communities across the country. I was thrilled when Raul was elected to Congress in 2012, where he’s become a strong voice for public health and infrastructure improvements.
When we started our work around the golf tournament, I didn’t know how deeply the foundation would become involved in community-based health, but it was clear that, even with significant support from national groups, government, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector, making real change in health outcomes required a group effort with the community, a message that still drives the foundation’s public health work today.
As soon as the summit ended, we knew that we wanted to create a new entity to build on the ideas and strategies discussed at the conference and the models we had developed in other countries to help communities with health challenges across the United States.
There were too many places like the Coachella Valley with extreme disparities in healthcare access and outcomes, depending on family income. People who could afford good healthcare got it, but for too many others, chronic—and preventable—conditions like diabetes and heart disease were a painful and growing reality. In the absence of universal healthcare coverage, which Hillary and I had worked hard for in the 1990s, long-term commitments by community stakeholders provided the next best alternative.
In the second year of the Humana Challenge we held health and wellness events for the community, and during the Health Matters Summit Dr. David Satcher, who had served as my surgeon general and founded the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, led a panel on the mental health and the addiction epidemic all over the U.S. in communities large and small. One of the panelists was my friend Vin Gupta, whose eldest son Ben was enrolled in George Washington University’s Law/MBA program and interned for Hillary at the State Department, when he drank a few beers with his girlfriend, then took a prescription opioid to “get a buzz.” The combination can kill, because together they deaden the part of the brain that keeps the body breathing while sleeping. Ben Gupta fell asleep and never woke up. The same thing happened to three children of friends of ours. Vin wanted to do something and gave us the seed money to launch our efforts to prevent opioid overdoses and treat addiction.
In 2015, after Mike McCallister had retired as Humana’s CEO, the company stopped sponsoring the golf tournament, and the PGA Tour selected CareerBuilder, the human resources and employment company, to succeed it. In 2016, we worked with them to fulfill our five-year commitment to the PGA, then handed the philanthropic reins over to California native Phil Mickelson and his wife, Amy, whose charitable causes included breast cancer research and a veterans support effort, Birdies for the Brave. We had helped save the tournament, but Phil was better positioned to sustain it.
After our tournament role ended, we kept working on critical community health issues in the Coachella Valley and in other communities with diverse problems and priorities, but we were caught in a painful paradox. As medical advancements provided more effective drugs and better treatments, Americans should have been getting healthier and living longer. Instead, lower- and middle-income Americans were dying from chronic diseases at increasingly high rates that were for the first time lowering life expectancy for some groups.
To have any chance of improving the situation, we needed to identify the differences in communities’ problems, capacities, and attitudes, and accept that a program that might work for one might not for another. If one community had an active grassroots volunteer presence, but a less engaged or undermanned and underfunded local government, our approach would need to be different than if we had committed government partners and less active citizens. Communities with a nearby university or an engaged philanthropic sector would have greater possibilities than those without either.
So our Health Matters people worked with local leaders to tailor our efforts to their specific needs. After the Coachella Valley, we first added programs in central Arkansas, then expanded to Northeast Florida, the Mississippi Delta, Knox County, Illinois, and Houston. In each new community we started with what we called a Community Health Transformation Process. We worked with local stakeholders to chart a Blueprint for Action tailored to their specific needs and strengths, then helped them to implement it. In a way, we were trying to bring the lessons of CHAI and CGI home to America.
As I visited and talked to the people who were doing the work on the ground, it was clear that the drop in life expectancy for white working-class men and women was being driven by more than rising rates of diabetes, heart disease, suicide, and fatal overdoses, and for women, smoking. Underneath those challenges was a sense of hopelessness. A lot of those people were dying of a broken heart. They had lost their sense that they mattered, so before long the rest of America didn’t matter to them.
Although the economy began to grow again during President Obama’s second year in office, and accelerated more strongly in his second term, it meant nothing to those who didn’t feel part of it. They were ripe for rage-based tribalism, something that as a white Southerner I was all too familiar with.
All societies are tribal, but the best of them are also inclusive: proud of their group, but welcoming of others. Rising resentment rooted in economic stagnation, social disrespect, and personal powerlessness is fertile ground for a polarized society, “us vs. them.” We count, they don’t. Today we are awash in the divisive tribalism I have opposed since I was a child. Growing up in Arkansas, I saw a lot of it, culminating in George Wallace winning my home state in the 1968 presidential race. The GOP had already begun its efforts to swing more Southern white voters to its banner, the people President Nixon called the “silent majority.” There were enough of them to beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Senator George McGovern in 1972. And of course, Trump lost the popular vote both times but prevailed in the Electoral College in 2016 and barely lost it in 2020. I’ll talk more about how this has affected our politics later. From a public health perspective, it’s important to realize how it’s also affected our personal health and happiness by making it harder to build strong, cohesive communities.
The picture was most stark when it came to the opioid epidemic. Tens of thousands of overdose deaths had gutted families and left far too many vulnerable children without parents. These absences left holes not only in families but also in their communities—the houses of worship, the businesses, the entire social fabric. In nearly every community a leader would tell us, “Look, prevention is ideal and that’s great. But I’ve got people dying every day in my town, and I need to stop the overdose deaths. I can’t do any prevention, I can’t do any planning, I can’t do anything until I literally stop the bleeding.”
We convened top leaders who were working on the epidemic who also said that in addition to our commitments to establish effective prevention and treatment efforts, we should immediately work to stop fatal overdoses by the best means available. An injectable drug known as naloxone had been used for years to treat opioid overdoses, allowing victims to survive long enough to get emergency treatment. Then, an Irish company, Adapt Pharma, had developed a nasal spray version called Narcan, which could be administered by just about anybody, giving the overdose victim precious time to get to a hospital. We began discussions with Adapt Pharma and by the time Narcan was approved for public use by the FDA in November of 2015, we had an agreement to help them distribute the nasal spray devices at a discount to group purchasers such as law enforcement, firefighters, first responders, departments of health, local school districts, colleges and universities, and community-based organizations. Through partnerships with Adapt Pharma and local philanthropic organizations, tens of thousands of doses of Narcan have been made available at a discount or free of charge, including a commitment by Adapt to provide every college campus in the U.S. with five doses of Narcan.
We’re still working to increase that number, and we’ve broadened our work by partnering with faith organizations to build roads to recovery, thanks to support from the states of Georgia and California. Faith leaders receive training in overdose prevention, become certified in Mental Health First Aid, learn how to speak about substance use disorders from the pulpit, and develop comprehensive guides on local prevention, treatment, and recovery resources for their communities.
Unlike most American issues, the opioid crisis has crossed the partisan divide. It’s an equal-opportunity scourge, sparking broad coalitions committed to reducing death and destruction. For example, in 2018, I accepted an invitation from GOP congressman Hal Rogers, who’s represented Eastern Kentucky for forty years, to participate in the seventh annual National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit. His district has been ravaged and he wanted the government to do more to deal with the epidemic. We have to do this together.
One thing the coronavirus didn’t destroy was the opioid epidemic. It got worse, as people in recovery were shut out of their usual support systems, while being even more vulnerable to the isolation, economic devastation, and other pressures that affected all Americans. In 2020, the Clinton Foundation partnered with Direct Relief International and other nonprofit and addiction groups to deliver 155,000 doses of Narcan, donated by Pfizer, to recovery residences in five states, the first step in what we hope will be a fifty-state effort to distribute the million doses Pfizer has pledged nationwide.
In the past few years, we handed over our community work to local leaders and ramped up our work on college campuses. We have a lot of challenges facing us, and if I’ve learned anything from the Clinton Foundation’s public health work, whether it’s getting lifesaving HIV/AIDS drugs to people who need them, combating obesity in our youngest citizens, or working with community stakeholders to improve health and reduce opioid deaths, it’s that we’re all in this together, and there’s no time to waste.