David Nabarro
Sir David Nunes Nabarro was a British Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization. He made his career in the international civil service, working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization. From February 2020, he helped the DGWHO deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Early life and education
Nabarro was the son of Sir John David Nunes Nabarro, whose cousin was Sir Gerald Nabarro, MP, and who was a consultant endocrinologist at University College Hospital and Middlesex Hospital, London. David attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, leaving in the summer of 1966.In a gap year between school and university, Nabarro was a community service volunteer. He spent a year as the organiser of Youth Action, York. A BBC television documentary was made about his volunteer work.
David Nabarro was an undergraduate and postgraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, and went on to study clinical medicine at University College Hospital, University of London. He qualified as a physician in 1974. He was a member of the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal College of Physicians by distinction.
Career
Early career
Nabarro worked as a medical officer in North Iraq for Save the Children, before working as a junior NHS doctor in Northampton and Oxford. From 1976 to 1978, Nabarro worked for Save the Children Fund as Medical Officer in Dhankuta, Nepal. Later, he did an M.Sc in Nutrition and became a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1982, he became Regional Manager for Save the Children Fund in South Asia, based in Kathmandu. In 1985 he joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine as senior lecturer in International Community Health and helped Professor Ken Newell to set up a Master's course in Community Health.After working in Iraq again to set up a Safe Havens project, David Nabarro moved to the Overseas Development Administration as a strategic adviser for health and population in East Africa, based in Nairobi, in 1989.
He became chief health and population adviser at the Overseas Development Administration in 1990, and moved on to become director of human development in 1997.
World Health Organization (1999–2005)
Nabarro joined the WHO in January 1999, as project manager of Roll Back Malaria, then moved to the Office of the Director General as executive director in March 2000. In this capacity, he worked with the director general Gro Harlem Brundtland for two years on a variety of issues, including the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, Health Systems Assessments and the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. As part of this work, he became for 1999-2001 a member of the board of directors of Medicines for Malaria Venture.Nabarro transferred to the Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments cluster in 2003 and was appointed representative of the DG for health action in crises in July 2003.
Nabarro was stationed in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, when it was bombed on the afternoon of 19 August 2003. The blast targeted the UN, which had used the hotel as its headquarters in Iraq since 1991.
He also coordinated support for health aspects of crisis response operations in Darfur, Sudan, and in countries affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Tsunami.
UN System senior coordinator (2005–2014)
In September 2005, Nabarro was seconded from WHO and appointed senior UN system coordinator for avian and human influenza by secretary-general of the UN Kofi Annan to ensure that the UN system made an effective and coordinated contribution to the global effort to control the epidemic of avian influenza.Coordinator of Global Food Security (HLTF) (2008–2014)
In January 2009, Nabarro took on the responsibility of coordinating the UN system's . The HLTF brought together 23 different organizations, funds, programs and other entities from within the UN family, as well as the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organization, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and tasked them with establishing a common strategy for addressing food and nutrition insecurity in a more sustainable, coordinated and comprehensive way. Nabarro left the HLTF coordinator position in 2014 and was succeeded by Giuseppe Fantozzi.Special representative of the UN Secretary-General (2009–2017)
In November 2009 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Nabarro as special representative on food security and nutrition. As special representative, Nabarro's role was to:- Align UN system action on people's food security, livelihood resilience and sustainable agriculture in the face of changing climates
- Support functioning of the Committee on World Food Security
- Oversee UN Secretary-General's
Coordinator of nutrition movement (2010–2015)
Betimes, he became Member of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity, 2013–2014.
Special envoy on Ebola (2014–2015)
In August 2014, Nabarro was designated as special envoy of the UN Secretary-General on Ebola, with the responsibility for ensuring that the UN system makes an effective and coordinated contribution to the global effort to control the outbreak of Ebola. The epidemic is believed to have begun in December 2013 with the death of a 2-year-old boy in a remote area of Guinea, but was not recognized until March 2014. For several months the epidemic was spreading. This is something that public health experts in the affected locations, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, claimed was due to a deeply flawed and delayed response by health and government officials.In an interview later in 2015, once Ebola had largely been brought under control, Nabarro said that when he started working on Ebola in 2014, he "was aware that we were in the middle of a disease outbreak of enormous proportions. The number of people getting sick was doubling every week. Facilities were completely overloaded. Communities were in a state of despair." He added that the international community had learned important lessons from the epidemic: "The world is going to be different as a result of this Ebola outbreak, much more confident, much more assured, and much, much more capable to ensure the well-being of its citizens."
Chair of the Advisory Group on Reform at WHO (2015–2016)
Nabarro was responsible for leading a high-level advisory group to guide reform of WHO's response to outbreaks and emergencies, prepare reports based on the group's recommendations and advise on the manner of their implementation.Head of UN's response to cholera in Haiti (2016–2017)
In 2016 Nabarro was tapped to lead the UN's response to Haiti's cholera epidemic. Cholera had killed more than 10,000 Haitians in the six years since the disease was introduced by UN peacekeepers in 2010. After UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a long overdue apology for the UN's "role" in the epidemic, Nabarro oversaw efforts to raise $400 million from UN member states to fund the Secretary General's proposed "New Approach" to cholera in Haiti. Nabarro was the second UN appointee to work on the cholera crisis in Haiti. Pedro Modrano Rojas previously served as a senior coordinator for the cholera effort, but left at the end of an 18-month term, stating that he was disappointed by the international community's "failure to acknowledge the fact that we have in Haiti the largest epidemic in the western hemisphere." Nabarro's efforts were no more successful—as a result of a lack of support from the UN Secretary General and from member states, Nabarro was only able to raise $2.7 million of the promised $400 million before being replaced by Josette Sheeran—though Sheeran would face the same obstacles as Nabarro.Special adviser on Sustainable Development and Climate Change (2016–2017)
In January 2016, Nabarro was appointed special adviser on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.One of Nabarro's responsibilities in this role were to lead the UN's response to the cholera epidemic its peacekeepers sparked in Haiti in October 2010 when untreated, infected sewage from a UN base was deposited in the country's main river system. As of August 2016, at least 10,000 people had died and more than 800,000 have been sickened in the epidemic.
Candidate for WHO Director-General (2016–2017)
In September 2016, Nabarro was nominated by the UK's First May ministry to stand for the post of director-general of the World Health Organization. An article co-authored by the UK's chief medical officer, Sally Davies, was published in The Lancet. It outlined the criteria that the next DG of the WHO must fulfill.Nabarro was one of six candidates put forward by their individual governments to succeed Margaret Chan. Nabarro outlined his four priorities as follows:
- Alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals
- Transforming the WHO to respond to outbreaks and health emergencies
- Trusted engagement with Member States
- Advancing people-centred health policies.