Sir David Nabarro obituary | Health
Many young people start by wanting to make a difference. Sir David Nabarro, who died at the age of 75, was unusual by recognizing the power of synergy very early on. At 17, he was the subject of a BBC documentary in 1967 on volunteering when he spent a year as an action organizer for young people, leading a group of 400 volunteers in York, between leaving the University of Ondle and going to the University of Oxford to study medicine. This experience – the coordination of efforts for a maximum impact – presumed a life in the public service spent to urge, cajolate and order others to work together.
After stays as a doctor in Iraq and Nepal, and as a health and population advisor in Kenya, he joined the World Health Organization, then the UN, leading the responses to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunamis, to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the 2016 Cholera epidemic in Haiti.
But it is as an WHO special to COVID-19, one of the six appointed by the Director General, that Nabarro has become the best known in the United Kingdom. He described the pandemic as a “health crisis unlike everything we met in my professional experience”. It was early to defend the use of masks and tests, tracing and isolation of infected individuals, but ran the controversy with its remarks on locking – which, according to him, were poorly cited. He argued that locks should be used as “circuit breakers”, as a reserve measure to temporarily slow down the spread of the virus, buy time and allow NHS and similar institutions to reorganize, group and rebalance their resources and protect their workers.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in 2020, he warned against a complete national locking, describing it as a “very extreme restriction on economic and social life” which “temporarily freezes the virus in place”. He added: “You do not want to use them as your primary, and I highlight the means of primary containment. Because in the end, living with the virus as a constant threat means maintaining the ability to find people with disease and isolate them.” The main measure, he thought, should be a robust test, trace and isolate test system, with the locking “the reserve you use to remove heat from the system when things are really bad”.
As a champion of lifelong health equity, he criticized the global response to the pandemic. He deplored the way politics started to change the way governments reacted to the world health emergencies. In an interview in 2021 with NPR, the US Public Radio Network, he recalled how the global response to Ebola in 2014 had been “incredible”, but that at the time of Covid-19, things had changed in 2020. “There was a funny change,” he said. “I find that world leaders are no longer apparently able to work together and manage this thanks to a global response.”
Despite his disappointment, he worked tirelessly to protect the United Kingdom and beyond the pandemic, pleading forcefully for vaccination equity. “The only thing we want [at the WHO] Does any country in the world be able to access a good part of the vaccine, “he said. He was knight in 2023.
His kindness, his humility and decency have enabled the staff, although his work ethics can be difficult. He was the “UN gandalf,” said Aurélia Nguyen of the for innovation for innovations. He “always worked behind the scenes in a wider goal in a way that was not visible or who needed to take credit but quietly brought people to the table which, otherwise, would not speak to each other. He worked every hour tirelessly – part of his staff can say merciless – but with such conviction and passion, he was not to follow him. ”
Born in London, David was one of the four children of Sir John Nabarro, an endocrinologist consultant, and Joan (née Cockrell). David studied at the Ondle school, Northampothire, before studying medicine at Worcester College, Oxford and University College Hospital, London.
He joined WHO in 1999, working on malaria first and later, alongside the general director Gro Harlem Brundtland on the creation of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has since saved millions of lives.
In 2003, he survived the bombing of the Hotel du Canal in Baghdad while serving as an OMU representative for health action in crises. He was appointed principal coordinator of the United Nations System for Aviary Flu (Bird flu) in 2005, establishing it as a pioneer in pandemic preparation.
His most visible role on the international scene occurred in 2014 when he coordinated an unprecedented response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Facing a situation where “the number of people with double patients each week”, he helped master the epidemic by hiring the community, strengthening confidence and by attacking social and economic factors as well as the supply of medical aid.
The synergy champion between social and medical interventions is the heritage of his service life.
In 2019, he became co -director, with me, of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at the Imperial College of London, a role to which he brought his vast operational experience, a remarkable capacity to build a consensus between various stakeholders and preparation for young researchers.
His office was always open to students and colleagues looking for advice, and his generous spirit has enriched the university community.
Nabarro is survived by his second wife, Florence Lasbennes, whom he married in 2019, and by five children – two sons and a daughter of a relationship with Susanna Graham -Jones, and a daughter and a son of her marriage to Gillian Holmes, who ended with divorce – and seven grandchildren.
