Dr. Paul Farmer, who devoted his life to fighting deadly epidemics, has died. He was 62

Dr. Paul Farmer, the tireless advocate for Haitians and global health crusader who devoted his life to delivering healthcare to millions of people on four continents, died Monday in Rwanda, his organization Partners in Health confirmed. He was 62.

A doctor, renowned infectious-disease specialist and medical anthropologist, Farmer was also a teacher at heart as he took on the world’s deadly epidemics and urged donors and governments to support healthcare for the poor. A person’s place of birth should not decide their access to good healthcare, he regularly stressed with his trademark “Do whatever it takes” attitude.

The cause of Farmer’s death was not immediately known, but it appears to be “an acute cardiac event,” said a spokesperson with Partners In Health, the nonprofit global health charity that Farmer co-founded in 1987 in rural Haiti and today is based in Boston. Earlier, the charity tweeted that Farmer had died unexpectedly Monday in his sleep.

“Paul Farmer’s loss is devastating, but his vision for the world will live on through Partners in Health,” the charity’s CEO, Dr. Sheila Davis, said in a statement. “Paul taught all those around him the power of accompaniment, love for one another, and solidarity.”

Though he was born in West Adams in western Massachusetts, Farmer grew up in Florida. He lived in Miami with his wife, Didi Bertrand Farmer, whom he met in Haiti, and their three children — Catherine, Elisabeth and Charles Sebastien — when he wasn’t shuttling back and forth between continents or teaching at Harvard University.

Farmer’s crusade began after a 1983 visit to Haiti where he met the Rev. Fritz Lafontant, an Episcopal priest, while visiting the rural community of Cange in the Central Plateau. Watching the death of patients, who could have been saved, inspired him to study infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School. Then in 1987, he, along with others including Dr. Jim Yong Kim, former head of the World Bank between 2012 and 2019, founded Partners In Health.

Over the years, the charity would expand to Peru, Russia and across Africa, including Rwanda, followed by the Navajo Nation and Mexico. The expansion would coincide with the rise of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises — spurred by the arrival of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera, Ebola, Zika, chikungunya and now SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.

While his big personality attracted presidents and admiring medical students, it was his ability to connect with the common man that gave him rock star status among the poor.

“It’s people and relationships that really mattered to him and he kept them for his whole life,” said Laurie Weiss Nuell, who along with her sister Jennie Block Weiss were among his close friends and collaborators in South Florida. “He must know 5,000 people across the countries and he knows their names, he knows their families, he knows all of them. It didn’t matter if you are the patient, or the sweeper or the president, he always treated everyone with the same dignity and respect. It was a gift he had.”

Maryse Kedar, a Port-au-Prince businesswoman and Farmer’s close friend, said while his sudden death is a loss for all who were inspired by him, “it’s the poor people” who are really losing.

Farmer grew up in a bus and on a boat

The second of six children, Farmer grew up Brooksville, Florida, just north of Tampa after his schoolteacher dad moved the family from Alabama. The family lived in an old school bus that had once been used as a roving clinic to immunize people against tuberculosis in Birmingham. His dad had converted it into a mobile home with no running water and later moved the family into a 50-foot gigantic rowboat from the USS Saratoga named the Liberty Launch.

He first met Haitians and heard Creole, which he later mastered, while working in a citrus grove.

After graduating from Hernando High in Brooksville, Farmer attended Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on a full scholarship. During visits to camps where migrants picked vegetables and tobacco, he again met Haitians, and after winning a $1,000 Berenson Prize, flew to Haiti to learn Creole and volunteer.

After enrolling in Harvard Medical School, he earned a degree in medicine and a doctorate in medical anthropology.

As news traveled about his sudden and shocking death, there was an outpouring of tear-filled tributes.

Janet Sanderson, a former 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 Farmer 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.”

Despite the despair that constantly confronted him, Farmer had a way of always seeing the upside. He didn’t care about money, had just one pair of shoes — despite his airplane miles, friends joked — and preferred to live among the poor in Cange, where he has a home, and with friends in the capital.

Once when he made a rare exception to attend a birthday dinner in Port-au-Prince, he noted that it was his first time in more than 20 years of visiting Haiti that he was going to eat at a restaurant.

“The wave of his kindness is never ending. It’s across the world and it became a tsunami,” said philanthropist Kimberly Green, who heads the Green Family Foundation and was incidentally the one celebrating a birthday that particular night.

Green said Farmer’s vision for bringing healthcare closer to the people was the inspiration behind her Green Family Foundation Neighborhood Health Education Learning Program in South Florida, which immerses medical students in the community as members of interprofessional teams.

“He did change the trajectory of my life,” she said.

Farmer was a man who preferred to be more behind the scenes than in front of it. There was always an air of discomfort with being propelled into the spotlight for his many awards, which included a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and Rwanda’s National Order of Outstanding Friendship (Igihango), which was bestowed on him by Rwandan President Paul Kagame in 2019.

When it was announced that he had won the 2020 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and its $1 million cash award, he expressed anxiety over being singled out. Without hesitation, he credited 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 told the Miami Herald. He named as primary beneficiaries 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,” he said, adding that his personal mission was to change the way humans think of infectious disease and address social inequalities in healthcare delivery.

The award’s announcement was made at a rare moment in Farmer’s life where he was riding out the early days of the pandemic at home in Miami tending to his garden but still pulling in 12 to 14 hour work days.

Farmer traveled to Rwanda six weeks ago to teach at the first class of a medical school that Partners In Heath had just opened, Nuell said, and to work at the hospital.

“He was really happy and was in really good spirits because he loves being a doctor, he loves taking care of poor people; he loves teaching,” said Nuell who was in regular contact with him. “It’s just so devastating for the world, and personally.”

Among his many cherished accomplishments was the construction of the post-quake, state-of-the-art 205,000-square-foot, 350-plus bed University Hospital of Mirebalais that Partners In Health and its sister organization in Haiti, Zanmi Lasante, built.

Constructed in record time, the hospital is one of the few successes from the commitment of donors after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, which Farmer tracked as deputy U.N. envoy to Haiti under former President Bill Clinton.

In a statement issued on behalf of himself, his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, Bill Clinton called Farmer “one of the most extraordinary people we have ever known,” whose pioneering work “advanced global health equity, and fundamentally changed the way healthcare is delivered in the most impoverished places on Earth.“

“He was brilliant, passionate, kind, and humble. He saw every day as a new opportunity to teach, learn, give, and serve — and it was impossible to spend any amount of time with him and not feel the same,” he added. “We are forever honored to have worked closely with him in Haiti, Rwanda, and beyond; to serve alongside him on the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative; and to be counted among his multitude of friends around the globe.”

Clinton and Farmer were not friends when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked the physician to serve as Clinton’s deputy in 2009, six months before the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake and while Haiti was still reeling from four back-to-back storms and hurricanes, food riots and international fatigue.

Farmer wanted to help but wasn’t sure about joining Clinton, whose Haiti policies he criticized.

But deciding it was better to be in the room providing an assist, he accepted.

As the two worked side by side to bring attention to the plight of Haitians both before and after the quake, their bond grew. Their shared admiration was such that after Clinton read a story in the Herald about how developmentally disabled babies in Haiti were being abandoned and left to die at the General Hospital, the former president reached out to Farmer to see what he could do.

The request coincided with Farmer’s 50th birthday, and while he didn’t like a fuss, he reluctantly allowed friends to throw him a party. Instead of gifts, people gave donations.

“He used his money from that to help buy the property where ZANMI BENI is,” said Nuell, who is involved with the residential community for abandoned and vulnerable children.

“I always say I think that ZANMI BENI is really the crux of what Partners In Health is,” Nuell added. “It’s really a social justice organization first; there are these children who were abandoned and of course orphaned; and they were vulnerable children and disabled children and they found a home for them. ... That’s Paul’s heart there too.”

In addition to the work he was already doing, Farmer had a new goal as of late. He planned to spend the next 10 years establishing the University of Global Health Equity in Haiti, and throughout all of the Partners in Health sites around the world.

“We now more than ever will make sure we honor his legacy and create one of the best universities in Haiti,” said Elizabeth Campa, director of UGHE Haiti. ”He was so excited. He said this would be his lasting legacy.”