Paul Farmer, global public-health pioneer and equity advocate (1959–2022)
To achieve his vision of a world in which everyone has access to health care, Farmer sometimes bent the rules. In the early days of PIH in the 1990s, he and co-founder Jim Yong Kim smuggled some US$92,000-worth of second-line tuberculosis drugs out of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where they both worked, to their patients in Peru, according to.
In private, however, they wanted to restructure systems, says Farmer’s close colleague, Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “They knew that to get this many people on HIV care, you’d have to change patent law, you’d have to change manufacturing, you’d have to build obstetrician–gynaecology clinics. He’d argue that you can’t take care of maternal-to-child transmission without good prenatal care,” she explains. “They were hustlers.
PIH stands apart from most other aid organizations in that it attempts not only to build clinics but also to ensure they remain sustainable by operating within government-run services and enlisting local staff at every level. “I am a living testament to that,” says Bailor Barrie, the executive director of PIH Sierra Leone, a branch established during the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Farmer and Barrie met when the latter was a global-health student in Farmer’s class at Harvard Medical School.
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