Witty attended Malbank School in Nantwich, and then gained a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Nottingham.
Career
Witty joined Glaxo UK in 1985 as a management trainee. He held various positions in the UK, including Director of Pharmacy & Distribution in Glaxo Pharmaceuticals UK. He served as a vice president and general manager of marketing of Glaxo Wellcome Inc., a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline with responsibility for strategy development, marketing execution and new product positioning. He served as an economic adviser to the Governor of Guangzhou, China from 2000-02. He was appointed president, Pharmaceuticals Europe of GlaxoSmithKline plc in January 2003 and succeeded Jean-Pierre Garnier as CEO following his retirement in May 2008. He is paid an annual salary of and receives bonuses and other compensation amounting to for this role. In February 2009 he pledged to make a major change in the way GSK pharmaceuticals are priced, in an attempt to make vital drugs more affordable in countries with the lowest incomes. At the same time he announced that GSK would place certain patents in a pool so that they were freely available for others in the search for new drugs. On 2 July 2012, GSK pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to a $3 billion settlement of the largest health-care fraud case in the U.S. and the largest payment by a drug company. The settlement is related to the company's illegal promotion of prescription drugs, its failure to report safety data, bribing doctors, and promoting medicines for uses for which they were not licensed. The drugs involved were Paxil, Wellbutrin, Advair, Lamictal, and Zofran for off-label, non-covered uses. Those and the drugs Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent, and Valtrex were involved in the alleged bribery scheme. In October 2012 it was announced that he had been appointed the Chancellor of the University of Nottingham with effect from 1 January 2013, having maintained strong ties with the university since graduation. Witty announced his retirement from the role of Chancellor in November 2017. In July 2013, the People's Republic of China announced that they were investigating allegations of fraud perpetrated by GSK going back to 2007 and involving thousands of millions of renminbi. Four GSK executives have already been arrested in China. It is alleged that the money was used, inter alia, to bribe around 25 travel agencies that organize conferences for doctors, in order to encourage the agencies to host GSK events. Witty later claimed that he knew nothing about the China fraud and tried to pass the blame onto subordinates. In November 2015, Witty's leadership of GSK was criticised by Neil Woodford, who said that "he’s not doing a very good job". Woodford called for GSK to be split into four companies. In March 2016, Witty announced that he was to stand down as chief executive. In July 2018, he become CEO of Optum, a division of UnitedHealth Group. In November 2019, he was named president of UnitedHealth, in addition to his role as CEO of Optum. In April 2020, Witty began a leave of absence from Optum to assist the World Health Organization in developing a vaccination for COVID-19.
Other activities
Political advisory
From 2013 to 2015, Witty served on the UNAIDS–Lancet Commission for Defeating AIDS and Advancing Global Health, co-chaired by Joyce Banda, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Peter Piot. From 2015 until 2016, he was a member of the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, led by Ruth Dreifuss and Festus Mogae. From 2017 until 2018, Witty led the National Health Service’s Accelerated Access Collaborative. In May 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he was appointed to the expert advisory group for the UK Government’s Vaccine Task Force, chaired by Patrick Vallance.
