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This time last year, it was becoming clear that the pandemic was not going to be gone by the summer.
As the initial panic morphed into more challenging longer term questions about how societies and their populations would operate, I was joined by Vasner Aciman, the sharp and ebullient CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, to get his outlook both as a CEO and a position on what it all meant.
The conversation became the inaugural edition of the Chiefs and since then we've profiled world leaders, the heads of humanitarian organizations, chief designers and those at the forefront of big business, from hospitality to retail and beyond.
But today, at a time when the vaccine rollout is enabling many countries to eye up the lifting of lockdowns for good, we're going back to the start.
From Basel, I'm joined once again by Novartis Vas Narasman to take stock of the year and look at how we prepare for what lies ahead.
From Novartis mission to reimagine medicine to Vaas personal learnings from the air, I'm Tyler Brulee and this is the Chiefs on Monocle 24.
Vaaz, thanks very much for joining us.
Almost one year on from when we spoke last time.
To kick things off today, maybe bring us up to speed, where do we sit?
You are in the heart of Basel.
You're looking across the border to Germany, you've got the sun twinkling off the Rhine.
But in this lifespan of this pandemic, where are we right now?
First, Great to be here again, Tyler.
I feel like a year flew by in many ways.
You know, when I reflect on the last year, on the one hand, so much devastation, I think so many lives lost, perhaps in some cases needlessly lost.
So a lot of reasons I think to reflect back and think what we could have done better as a global society, as healthcare systems.
But on the flip side, I'm also quite optimistic.
I think there's hard to believe we would have had this many vaccines that are highly effective, better and better therapeutics, the possibility of having 10 to 12 billion doses of vaccine by the end of this year, large scale rollout starting to happen around the world.
Ultimately, I think the triumph of science and the biotechnology industry and academia working together to ultimately come up with solutions.
So I'm optimistic about the second half of this year returning to some sense of normalcy and I think a lot of lessons learned.