Since he was 12, Dr. Danny Avula knew that he wanted to work in medicine. “Some of that was inclination,” he says with a laugh. “And some of that was parental guidance.” But he admits to other callings, too.
“If you had asked me at that time, what do I want to do with my life, I would have said either be a doctor or the frontman in a heavy metal band.”
Luckily for the Richmond region, the smiling, unflappable Avula — the antithesis of a noisy, angry headbanger — chose the former path. As the director of the Richmond City and Henrico County health departments, the 42-year-old Church Hill resident is responsible for overseeing the population health of more than 561,000 residents.
That job was put into overdrive with the spread of the novel coronavirus. A 10-time Top Doc in Richmond magazine’s Public Health category, Avula has been serving as the COVID-19 health policy adviser to politicians, schools, nonprofits and the private sector, all while being a data collector and spokesperson.
His regular media appearances, often standing with figures such as Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, have earned him comparisons with national COVID expert Dr. Anthony Fauci. He’s cool with that.
“Do I mind being called Richmond’s Dr. Fauci? No way,” Avula says, talking on the phone late at night (the only time he has available). “What could be a higher honor right now?”
“People trust Danny,” says Stoney, who contracted the virus in January and has since recovered, “With all of the misleading messages we get from social media and TV, people find it very difficult to trust someone right now. But people know that Danny’s not going to cut corners. He’s straight forward, direct, uses the data and uses his knowledge and expertise to lead his decision making.”
‘Happy Warrior for Public Health’
“For me, not being a medical professional, Danny makes the concepts really accessible,” says Abby Rogers, president and CEO of the Greater Richmond YMCA, where Avula sat on the board for many years and chaired the Y’s social responsibility committee. “He thinks about what this will be like for people, and how we can help people reach critical services.”
Dr. Art Kellermann, CEO and senior vice president of VCU Health System, calls Avula a “happy warrior for public health.”
“It’s not about making himself famous, getting tons of money, or having the nicest house in Richmond, it’s about making this place as healthy as it can be,” Kellerman says. “You don’t often see doctors come right out of training and realize that this is their calling. With him, I do think it’s a calling.”
Avula’s job duties include being an on-call health expert, a CEO overseeing a 250-member team of preventive specialists and the region’s chief community health strategist. (A board-certified pediatrician, he even finds time to take an occasional shift at a local pediatric hospital.)
He considers the health strategist role to be “by far his favorite part of the work.
“It involves having a big-picture lens, and the ability to rally partners and collaborators,” Avula says. “The local health department can’t do it on their own. They need hospitals and health care systems, acute-care safety nets and the philanthropic community to all come to the table and figure out how we can solve the problem.”
In January, Avula took a leave of absence from the director’s desk, jumping from the regional frying pan into a bigger, hotter statewide fire. He became the commonwealth’s “vaccination czar,” tapped by Gov. Ralph Northam to lead Virginia’s effort in distributing COVID-19 vaccines. “He knows how to get things done,” Northam said at the press conference where he announced the appointment.
Within weeks, Virginia went from the bottom of the list in national vaccination distribution to the top 10. But it wasn’t anything he did, Avula insists. “We all knew that we were getting doses out there,” he says. “It turns out that hundreds of thousands of doses were being incorrectly logged into the database.”
Avula describes his new role as “simultaneously getting as much vaccine out there as possible and addressing issues of equity. ... We know that our minority residents, African American and Latino, have much higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID, so there is a lot of effort in getting those segments vaccinated.”
“I can’t say enough about how calm, measured, transparent and inclusive, and frankly just how wicked smart he is,” says Dr. Matthew Schefft of the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, who watched Avula up close as a member of the Richmond Public Schools Health Advisory Council. Avula was criticized last November for advising Richmond Public Schools that classrooms could reopen because data showed that COVID transmission wasn’t as prevalent in schools and could be mitigated.
“There are some community members who thought he was bringing a skewed perspective,” Schefft says, “but I really think he tried to lay out the facts and let them make their own decisions. He certainly wasn’t telling RPS that they had to open.”
Earning Trust
Avula was born in India and brought to the U.S. when he was 6 months old by his parents, Raj and Lalitha, who were U.S. Department of Defense employees. The family, including his younger brother, John, who is now a doctor at Bon Secours in Hanover, settled in Northern Virginia when Danny was in elementary school (that’s when he developed his incongruous taste for Mötley Crüe and Poison).
“My parents rushed me through school,” he recalls. “I didn’t go to kindergarten and started first grade when I was 4. And then I finished college in three years. ... I was only 19 when I left UVA.”
He earned a bachelor’s in biology from the university, where he also met his future wife, Mary Kay. The couple has five children, ranging in age from 9 to 20. Post-graduation, he decided to stay in Charlottesville and take a break.
“I was pretty young, and I wasn’t quite ready to leave college life,” he says. “I didn’t want to move.” He taught at a Charlottesville private school for a time. “I remember that I was 19, and I had 18-year-olds in my Algebra 2 class. It was crazy.”
He came to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine, where he eventually did his pediatrics residency. “I’ve been in Richmond ever since,” he says, except for a stint at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he took a residency in preventive medicine.
By design, the final rotation of his residency was in the Richmond City Health District. “I was working as a fellow there, and then a few weeks into that, the deputy director left, and [Dr. Donald Stern] asked if I would be interested in the role,” Avula recalls.
“It was a no-brainer,” says Stern, the retired director of the Richmond health district. “You could see Danny had a clear grasp and broad scope of public health preventive medicine. In public health, we think about groups of people and factors that contribute to ill health or injury and try to employ preventive strategies rather than curative strategies.”
When Avula stepped into the director’s role five years ago, one of his most important initiatives was to consolidate Richmond and Henrico County’s public health offices, a move the YMCA’s Rogers thinks was prescient.
“We couldn’t have seen the added value of that move until the pandemic,” she says. “It’s a tremendous benefit to the community having him overseeing both of those departments.”
VCU Health’s Kellermann, who started his job last year, remembers getting a call from the new vaccination czar in January. Avula told him that, even though more was on the way, Richmond was temporarily low on doses at a time when the state was conducting a major vaccination drive. It was discovered that VCU had 7,000 second doses in reserve for its essential workers, and Avula asked Kellerman for a loan.
“He said, ‘I promise you will get your doses back in time, and your employees will not miss them,’ “ Kellerman says. “And, you know, it was a nail-biter, but it worked out. They pulled off the drive, and none of our employees missed a dose.”
It is doubtful that other public health leaders would have done such creative horse-trading, he adds, “much less have the trust and goodwill to go to a CEO that he hadn’t worked with that much and say, ‘Will you put it on the line and help us out?’ “
“Through the month of January, vaccines just weren’t coming at a high enough level,” Avula says, quickly adding that supplies are picking up now.
“I’ve mapped out the next few months,” he adds in his trademark reassuring tone. “Our goal is to get to 75, 80% of the people vaccinated. And we know that 30% say they won’t get a vaccine. So sometime in May or June, the campaign will probably shift to persuading people to follow the data.”
Luckily for Virginia, Danny Avula is really good at the persuasion stuff.
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