Remembering David Nabarro: ‘a great champion of global health and health equity’

Sir David Nunes Nabarro, a physician, international public health advocate and one of the early experts helping with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, died on Friday at age 75.

“David was a great champion of global health and health equity, and a wise, generous mentor to countless individuals,” WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus wrote on social network X on Saturday. “His work touched and impacted so many lives across the world.”

Nabarro, the son of a British member of Parliament, was a trained physician who spent his early career working in Iraq, South Asia and East Africa, in various nonprofit and academic positions in nutrition and child health.

But that’s just one part of his legacy. He helped coordinate the World Health Organization’s response to the Indian earthquake and tsunami in 2004. In epidemiology, he worked to contain AIDS, malaria and bird flu.

And he was perhaps best known for his work with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, trying to stop outbreaks of diseases like Ebola in 2014 and eventually helping spread public-health messaging in the response to COVID-19 — work that helped earn him a knighthood by King Charles in 2023.

Nabarro lamented how politics had begun shifting how governments responded to global health emergencies. In an interview with NPR in 2021, Nabarro recalled how the coordinated global response to Ebola in 2014 was “amazing.”  By the time COVID-19 developed, he told A Martinez, things had changed.

“There has been a funny shift between 2015, when I was working on Ebola, and 2020 to ’21, working on COVID,” Nabarro said. “And it’s this — I find that world leaders are just no longer apparently able to work together and deal with this problem through a global response.” 

In 2017, Nabarro was a finalist to head the WHO, but came in second to Tedros. Nabarro then became a special envoy for the organization, helping in particular with messaging for how to handle what was, in early 2020, a novel coronavirus.

“Please take this virus very seriously,” Nabarro pleaded with the American public in the early months of the pandemic, urging them to wear masks, keep distance from each other and to avoid going out if sick. “It is important that we recognize that this virus is dangerous and we’ve all got to work to get on top of it,” he urged in a June 2020 interview with CNN. “We’re dealing, frankly, with an enemy.”

As the pandemic wore on, Nabarro also became a critic of repeated lockdown measures as a government response to recurring outbreaks. Instead, he believed national responses should focus on detection and isolation of cases. “We just couldn’t understand why so many countries were see-sawing between what was sometimes called freedom and lockdown,” he told a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, reflecting back on the initial years of the pandemic. “That is not the way. You keep your number of cases down by having really good surveillance and detection and isolation.”

And he was an advocate for vaccine equity, telling NPR in a 2021 interview that wealthy nations need to finance vaccines for “poor countries around the world.” He said: “We’re in a situation where there’s still quite a tight supply situation, and that is always a concern to us in the World Health Organization ’cause the one thing we want is every country in the world to be able to access a fair share of the vaccine, and we’re not there at the moment.”

The loss of his voice was mourned by an organization called Scaling Up Nutrition, an international nonprofit aimed at addressing child malnutrition. “For David, nutrition was never just about food, it was a core element of societal change and development,” the group wrote in a statement. “David brought people together — not just across disciplines and borders, but across ideologies — believing deeply that progress could only be made by listening, learning, and leading with empathy.”

Nabarro died suddenly in his home late Friday, according to a statement from 4SD Foundation, a group he co-founded to foster new leaders in food, nutrition and climate change. The cause of death was not disclosed. He is survived by his wife, Flo, five children and seven grandchildren.