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.)