Global health luminary Paul Farmer was in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss key lessons from the Ebola response — and catch up with some old friends.
Fresh off his Dec. 4 appearance on the popular U.S. television show “The Colbert Report,” Farmer found a few minutes to chat with Devex on the sidelines of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that asked him to talk about global health’s “human resources crisis” and what can be done to overcome it.
Stay tuned for the interview in coming days.
We learned that Farmer met Tuesday with his old friend and close associate Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank and fellow Ebola crusader. The two medical anthropologists reportedly went to dinner together, after which Kim joined Farmer for a Partners in Health conference call in Farmer’s hotel room.
Kim, Farmer and others co-founded PIH in 1987. Farmer gained prominence as “the man who would cure the world,” after the publication of the book “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” which profiled his work in Haiti. Kim left PIH to join the World Health Organization, and is currently leading the world’s largest development finance institution through a tumultuous internal reform process.
Farmer left Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to visit PIH’s headquarters in Boston before returning to his current home in Kigali, Rwanda.
Look out for more Devex coverage of Farmer’s message to U.S. health implementers, Congress and policymakers soon.
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