Paul Farmer died to­day. You might not know him, but here is what you must know about him, even if he is dead. If you are al­ready well aware of who Paul Farmer was– af­ter all, he’s con­sid­ered one of the great­est celebri­ties of our times – you should be telling more peo­ple about him.

BEST HEALTH EX­PERTS IN THE WORLD SAY MIL­LIONS OF PEO­PLE in the world are alive to­day be­cause there was this man called Paul Farmer. Paul Farmer re­fused to be­lieve that they need to be left to die when the rest of the world stopped car­ing. He never be­lieved that noth­ing can be done. And if he knew some­thing was only fic­tion, that there was noth­ing on fact to back it up, he made it a cause to do some­thing about it.

When, in 2001, the head of US­AID told Con­gress that treat­ment for HIV af­flicted could not be ex­tended to poor peo­ple around the world be­cause it was doomed to fail, be­cause the med­ica­tion must be taken on a sched­ule but peo­ple in some of the world’s poor­est re­gions have no idea of time, hours, clocks or watches, Paul Farmer knew it was just fic­tion.

The record will for­ever show that the US­AID’s head ac­tu­ally told the Con­gress that stu­pid stuff, just as it will tell the fu­ture gen­er­a­tions that Paul Farmer had al­ready ex­posed that lie be­fore it was even spo­ken: he had launched an HIV treat­ing ini­tia­tive in Haiti, one of the most com­pre­hen­sive health­care pro­grams, the world had ever seen. It later proved to be a great suc­cess in other places, too, in­clud­ing Sierra Leone.

When they claimed a coun­try like Rwanda can­not have a world-class teach­ing hos­pi­tal, Paul Farmer helped set up one.

I dis­cov­ered Paul Farmer dur­ing the days when I was watch­ing The West Wing, Aaron Sork­in’s bril­liant and per­haps utopian take on a De­mo­c­ra­tic White House. In Sea­son 2, Episode 4, the US pres­i­dent is meet­ing his coun­ter­part from an African na­tion who ar­gues with US phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms to make cer­tain drugs more
ac­ces­si­ble to HIV-blighted re­gions of Africa. While he’s in the White House, his coun­try is taken over by his army gen­er­als, his broth­er’s sons are mur­dered and his wife was be­ing held cap­tive. He is of­fered asy­lum but he chooses to re­turn home know­ing full well that he could be killed upon land­ing. Well, he is killed upon land­ing.

It was an in­spir­ing episode. Many of the com­ments on var­i­ous snip­pets from that
episode of The West Wing on YouTube re­ferred to the work of Paul Farmer. I should
have read more about him at the time but could not.

Later, when some­one told me John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” has in­side views
of Anne Frank’s house, I went to watch the movie and fol­lowed it up by read­ing a
cou­ple of his in­ter­views wherein he said how he had al­ways been im­pressed by the work of peo­ple like Paul Farmer.

That’s when I dis­cov­ered Tracy Kid­der’s re­mark­able book —“Moun­tains Be­yond Moun­tains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World”. Paul Farmer brought home the fact that dis­eases of­ten have so­cial roots, and that pa­tients can’t be cured to be sent back into the same mis­er­able con­di­tions that made them sick in the first place. You need so­cial struc­tures to cure the world!

Paul Farmer’s s in Health has sig­nif­i­cantly in­flu­enced pub­lic health strate­gies for re­spond­ing to tu­ber­cu­lo­sis, H.I.V. and Ebola.

He was an icon; al­ways will be. From An­thony Fauci to Jim Yong Kim, they all con­sid­ered Paul Farmer a great man, a pub­lic health lu­mi­nary. (Please watch the 2017 doc­u­men­tary, “Bend­ing the Arc.” It’s there on Net­flix.)

His love af­fair with Haiti is the stuff of ro­mance. We have stopped be­ing sur­prised over things that shocked the young Paul Farmer who had grad­u­ated from Duke Uni­ver­sity and had just moved to Haiti.

Kid­der’s book has the text of the let­ter he wrote to a friend, ex­press­ing shock that the hos­pi­tal was not cater­ing to the poor and that every­thing has to be paid for in ad­vance. The same thing hap­pens at our hos­pi­tals every day; we are no more sur­prised by it. That’s our tragedy.

Af­ter the death of AIDS ac­tivist Larry Kramer dur­ing the first Covid sum­mer, the loss of Paul Farmer feels even more acute. I had come to know of Kramer as the fel­low who wrote that won­der­ful screen­play for DH Lawrence’s “Women In Love,” but then hated him for hav­ing made a mu­si­cal re­make and mock­ery of Frank Capra’s clas­sic Lost Hori­zon. It is only af­ter I read about his fights with Fauci dur­ing his ac­tivism for HIV treat­ment and his con­fronta­tional style of fo­cussing upon the is­sue did I dis­cover the man Larry Kramer was. Be­tween Kramer and Farmer, there’s a lot to learn about ac­tivism. Their lives are a Shangri La of ac­tivism.

John Green has paid his trib­ute in The Wash­ing­ton Post to­day. Here, you can read
that, too, but ba­si­cally, I just wanted you to know that Paul Farmer is dead, and that
you should know who he was, and you should tell a lot of other peo­ple who he was.
You can throw in words like an an­thro­pol­o­gist, Har­vard etc, but he was Paul Farmer
— the kind that comes too rarely!

In his trib­ute, Tracy Kid­der wrote in the New York Times: “Paul’s ba­sic be­lief was
that all hu­man be­ings de­serve equal re­spect and care, es­pe­cially when they are sick.
His dream, he once told me, was to start a move­ment that would refuse to ac­cept,
and would strive to re­pair, the grotesque health in­equities among and within the
coun­tries of the world. When I first met him — in Haiti, in 1994 — he had al­ready
cre­ated a grow­ing health care sys­tem in a des­per­ately im­pov­er­ished area. I thought
he’d done a lot al­ready. Now, look­ing back, I re­al­ize that he was just get­ting
started.”

“Paul’s ba­sic be­lief was that all hu­man be­ings de­serve equal re­spect and care, es­pe­cially when they are sick.”

His work is­n’t fin­ished. In fact, he was work­ing when he died. He died in Rwanda, on
the grounds of the hos­pi­tal he had set up — an un­ex­pected, shock­ing death. We
needed him. This world needed him. It still needs him. There’s still work to be done.
Now, it’s up to you. The In­dian me­dia has not done a very good work of telling
peo­ple that Paul Farmer is dead. If it had, a lot of peo­ple would have known who
Paul Farmer was. You telling your friends about Paul Farmer will take his work
for­ward. Paul Farmer must­n’t die. We need to keep him alive among us, within us.

(Paul Farmer died on Feb 21, 2022. This piece was writ­ten within min­utes of the
news of his death break­ing, and was ini­tially cir­cu­lated on so­cial me­dia. This ver­sion was up­dated with the ad­di­tion of Tracy Kid­der’s trib­ute. We pub­lish it here af­ter duly ob­tain­ing the au­thor’s con­sent. SP Singh is a se­nior jour­nal­ist.)