David Nabarro, doctor who tried to raise millions to treat cholera in Haiti, dies at 75

Miami Herald

4 days ago

The United Nations and world health community are mourning the death of David Nabarro, the British physician and public health champion who led the U.N response to eradicating cholera in Haiti after taking on some of the world's most pressing diseases, including Ebola.
A passionate advocate who was once described to the Miami Herald as the U.N.'s go-to guy for responding 'to really tricky' situations, Nabarro died Friday at his home in Ferney-Voltaire, France, a suburb of Geneva, according to the 4SD Foundation, a Switzerland-based social enterprise he founded and where he served as strategic director. He was 75. His passing was described as a 'sudden death.'
'Dr. Nabarro was a tireless advocate for global health -- a leader who brought clarity, compassion and conviction to some of the world's most complex health emergencies, from AIDS and malaria to avian influenza and the COVID-19 pandemic,' Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said in a statement Tuesday.
'He dedicated his life to the conviction that health is a human right — and worked to help make that right a reality for all people everywhere,' Haq added.
Nabarro was known for his organized, results-oriented style and willingness to take personal risks. During the COVID pandemic, he served as one of six special envoys to the World Health Organization dealing with the coronavirus crisis. For his efforts and overall contributions to global health, he was knighted by King Charles III in 2023.
Among those contributions was his fight against Ebola. With more than 30 years experience as a public health doctor when he was appointed coordinator of the U.N's efforts, Nabarro ended up raising $3.5 billion to fight Ebola despite the incessant and worrying questions from donors asking him if he knew what he was doing and if he had a strategy.
'There was a question mark always over whether or not we had a strategy that made sense, whether or not we knew what we were up to,'' he told the Herald in a 2016 interview.
Soon he faced the same kinds of question as he tried to raise $400 million for the U.N.'s cholera plan in Haiti.
Nabarro had been tapped to serve as special adviser to then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who after years of fighting litigation efforts by victims and refusing to acknowledge the U.N.'s role in inadvertently introducing the deadly disease into Haiti, was ready to take it on the problem. Scientific studies and a confidential U.N. report had traced Haiti's outbreak to Nepalese soldiers, part of a U.N. peacekeeping contingent stationed near a river in the rural town of Mirebalais after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.
By the time Nabarro was involved cholera had killed at least 9,393 people and sickened more than 790,840 in the Caribbean country. His job was to help the secretary general raise hundreds of millions of dollars over two years to fund a U.N. plan to eliminate cholera with rapid responses, vaccinations and improving long-term access to clean water and sanitation.
By the time Nabarro came on the scene in late 2016, Ban had finally admitted the U.N.'s role and offered an apology during a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. He wanted Nabarro to do for cholera what he had done for Ebola in Africa: galvanize government efforts and raise money.
'I have no illusions about this. It's going to be tough,' Nabarro told the Herald two weeks before visiting Haiti with Ban. 'But I am not scared by it.'
Over the next few months, Nabarro made other visits and devoted himself to the cholera problem as well as to the fight against global hunger. To understand the waterborne disease's evolution and response, he reached out to a number of public health experts including Ariel Henry. The physician, who would later serve as Haiti's prime minister, was in the administration of then-President René Préval and was helping with the government's response.
At the time Préval was facing immense pressure from the Obama administration to hold presidential and legislative elections in Haiti despite the deaths of more than 300,000 people and 1.5 million homeless in the quake. Fearing that placing blame on the U.N. would lead to the departure of its blue helmet peacekeepers and open the door to more violence and instability, Préval tried to manage the response on his own.
But as time went by, pressure built for the U.N. to not only acknowledge its role but to apologize and compensate victims.
Instead of checks to victims, Ban called for vaccinating adults and dispatching more rapid response teams within 24 to 48 hours of an infection. He also pledged that the U.N. would improve water and sanitation in places where cholera had spread.
In an email exchange in 2017 while vying for the top job at the World Health Organization, Nabarro acknowledged that the effort to raise financing to eradicate cholera in Haiti had not been easy.
The amount of money raised was small, but he still held onto hope that the benefits would be enormous.
'I really do hope that I get to the director general of the World Health Organization as I would then be able to give a very high priority to a concerted and sustained effort to reduce the incidence of cholera in the country and to help all Haitians to access drinking water and functioning sanitation,' he told a Herald reporter.
Nabarro lost out on the WHO job to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a post on the social media platform X on Saturday, Ghebreyesus remembered Nabarro as 'a great champion of global health and health equity, and a wise, generous mentor to countless individuals.'
Through Nabarro's efforts and those of others in Haiti, the country was declared cholera-free in February 2022 by Henry, now the country's prime minister, after three years without a confirmed case.
The celebration was short-lived. By the end of the year, repeated gang clashes, which cut off access to water, fuel and hospitals in Port-au-Prince, gave rise to a resurgence of cholera cases.
Nabarro is survived by his wife, Flo; his children, Tom, Ollie, Polly, Josie and Lucas, and seven grandchildren.