Dr. Paul Farmer, the renowned infectious disease specialist who devoted his life to fighting deadly epidemics and spent the last several years working on four continents delivering health care to millions, has died in Rwanda, his organization Partners in Health confirmed. He was 62.
A Florida native who lived in Miami with his wife and children when he wasn’t traveling or teaching at Harvard University, Farmer was co-founder of Partners In Health, a nonprofit health care organization based in Boston with a sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, in Haiti.
The recipient of many awards, one of his most recent being the 2020 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and its $1 million cash award, Farmer told the Miami Herald that his personal mission was to change the way humans think of infectious disease and address social inequalities in health care delivery.
The cause of Farmer’s death was not immediately known but PIH said in a tweet that Farmer passed away unexpectedly Monday in his sleep.
As news traveled about his shocking death, tributes poured in with the headline “devastating news.”
Janet Sanderson, a retired diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Haiti, called Farmer “a true giant.” “His dedicated, impassioned, and selfless work in Haiti — and anywhere else there was need — is his lasting legacy,” she said.
Patrick Gaspard, former head of Open Society Foundation and U.S. ambassador to South Africa, said the acclaimed doctor and anthropologist was a dear friend and brother who had just given him words of encouragement about the situation in Haiti.
“Paul’s selflessness was inspiring and humbling,” tweeted Gaspard, who is Haitian American and serves as president and chief executive officer of the Center for American Progress. “This one hurts. Gutted. Deep condolences to his wife Didi and children. Damn.”
Farmer was personable and preferred to be more behind the scenes than in front of it. When it was announced that he had won the Berggruen Prize, he said he was deeply honored but still felt anxiety over being single-out. Without hesitation be began crediting his army of researchers and healthcare providers, and said “a gift this large, allows me to join the donor class.”
“I’m going to steer my prize money to two big but far from insurmountable problems: Getting us out of this pandemic and amping up our reckoning with racial injustice,” he said. “Primary beneficiaries will include two organizations with which I’ve been involved for decades, Partners In Health and the Equal Justice Initiative. These are organizations that do not turn away from the problems associated with exclusion, and the mistrust that invariably follows exclusion.”
Before COVID-19, Farmer devoted his life to fighting every major epidemic that had hit the countries where he devoted his time: HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera, Ebola, Zika and chikungunya and now COVID-19.
Among his many cherished accomplishments was the construction of the post-quake, state-of-the-art 200,000-square-foot University Hospital of Mirebalais that Partners In Health and Zanmi Lasante, built in Haiti.
