A surprising sentence post-2020: This year is unlike any other in the history of global health. With the confirmation of anti-establishment leaders Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Marty Makary, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to the U.S.’s top health positions, President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the defunding of USAID, health professionals are scrambling to understand whether their work can continue, and, if not, what will happen to patients. In a year of such upheaval, the TIME100 Health—100 people who are most influential in the world of health right now—looks a bit different.
A lot is happening.Â
To select these 100 individuals, our team of health correspondents and editors, led by Emma Barker Bonomo and Mandy Oaklander and with guidance of Dr. David Agus and Arianna Huffington, spent months consulting sources and experts around the world. The result is a community of leaders—scientists, doctors, advocates, educators, and policy-makers, among others—who are changing the health of the world.
There are pioneers, like Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who, stricken by the alarming statistics of the teen mental-health crisis, took on Big Tech to ban kids under 16 from social media in his country. And there are innovators, like Tomas Cihlar and Wesley Sundquist, who came up with Gilead’s lenacapavir, a new way to treat HIV with only two shots per year.
Dr. Peter Lurie is a leader who, as president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has been lobbying to get cancer-linked synthetic food dyes out of our diets for decades, and, in January, finally succeeded with the banning of Red Dye No. 3 in U.S. foods. Princess Kate Middleton catalyzed a powerful conversation about rising cancer rates in young adults when she spoke out about her own diagnosis at age 42.
Then there are the titans, like World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on the cover of this issue. Faced with losing its largest funder and most powerful member when the U.S. withdrew from the organization in January, Ghebreyesus is pivoting to make a more nimble WHO focused on establishing health independence in developing nations, while holding out hope for talks with President Trump. TIME spent time with Ghebreyesus at WHO headquarters in Geneva, where he spoke candidly about past mistakes and the path forward for global health.
Whether the individuals on this list are familiar or entirely new to you, the work they’re doing is changing the lives of people in your community and around the globe. Later in May, TIME will gather the TIME100 Health members in New York City for an exchange of ideas about how to make a healthier world.
