Welcome back, MPW Daily readers. I hope you had a restorative holiday season, with the chance to slow down and reflect. As I was doing my own reflecting on 2025, one moment stood out to me. It was one of my favorite moments of the year in MPW—and an inspiring note to enter 2026 on.
At the Most Powerful Women Summit in October, I moderated an off-the-record conversation about “life after the big job” with three former CEOs, including Karen Lynch of CVS Health and Roz Brewer of Walgreens. Those jobs pitted the two against each other as fierce competitors, fighting for market share of the U.S. drugstore market, pharmacy, walk-in health care, and vaccines. Yet you’d never know it from the camaraderie and friendship between the two, who now share an experience few others can fully understand.
As CEO of CVS Health, Lynch led the largest business ever led by a female CEO. Brewer was one of just a handful of Black women to ever lead a Fortune 500 company. And, between the two of them, they successfully vaccinated nearly the entire United States against COVID.
Lynch’s tenure as CVS Health’s CEO started on Feb. 1, 2021, and she was thrust into rolling out the first COVID vaccine at CVS locations nationwide, with a staff of 50,000 immunizers at the time. She was promoted from within the company, and was involved in the company’s COVID vaccine rollout from its earliest days, even before then. It was a small part of her business strategy, but an enormously consequential job for the safety and health of the country. Brewer’s CEO tenure at Walgreens spanned March 2021 to 2023, and coming from outside health care, she immediately tackled one of the industry’s most significant challenges.
