Geneva – Dr. David Nabarro, a British doctor who has directed the United Nations response to some of the biggest health crises in recent years, including the bird flu, Ebola and the coronavirus pandemic, has died. He was 75 years old.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Managing Director of the World Health Organization, confirmed Nabarro’s death on the social media platform.
“David was a great champion of world health and health equity, and a wise and generous mentor for countless people,” Tedros wrote on Saturday. “His work has touched and had an impact on so many lives around the world.”
King Charles III headed Nabarro in 2023 for his contributions to global health after being one of the six special envoys to the WHO on COVID-19. He won the 2018 World Food Prize for his work on health and hunger problems.
He was also a candidate for the first job in the WHO in 2017, but lost against Tedros in the last voting series. Nabarro left the UN later that year.
In 2003, Nabarro survived a bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad who killed 22 people, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time, and injured dozens of others.
Nabarro, then one of the main managers of WHO, was in a meeting when “suddenly, there was this extraordinary deaf noise,” he told journalists at an emotional press conference a few days later in Geneva, still carrying his notebooked notebook.
“We found first aid kits, have obtained bandages and put people on their side. We worked in a cloud, in this fog of groans and crying,” he recalls.
The 4SD Foundation, a social company in Switzerland where Nabarro was strategic director, said that he died on Friday in a “sudden passage”.
“David’s inexpressible generosity and inexpressible commitment to improve the lives of others are missing a lot,” he said.
Thuy Maryen, the longtime friend of Nabarro and the former communications director of the Foundation, said that he was 75 years old and died at his home in Ferney-Voltaire, in France, a suburb of Geneva.
The Foundation focuses on the mentoring of the next generation of leaders in global sustainable development.
The survivors include his wife, Flo, as well as his five children and seven grandchildren.
