The good doctor's mission: Atul Gawande sets out to reform US healthcare

Obamacare, he argues, has already provided a good starting point that can now be taken forward full-throttle with the new administration

It was a not-so-small matter of a smallpox vaccine that altered the course of Atul Gawande’s life. The trajectory of the Indian-origin America-born surgeon, author and public health researcher, who was recently appointed to US President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, would have been radically different had it not been for a severe reaction to the initial smallpox vaccine he had as an infant in 1965 in New York.

That sealed the fate of his parents who, instead of returning to Nagpur in Maharashtra, moved to Athens, Ohio with a newborn they could not risk bringing back to India. It