Dr. Paul Farmer, the infectious disease specialist and anthropologist whose work in Haiti beginning in the 1980s had helped establish Partners in Health and whose life had been dedicated to demonstrating that excellent healthcare could and should be provided to the world’s poorest populations, was deeply engaged with Haiti’s multiple simultaneous crises in 2021. His response to the earthquake, the assassination, and the ongoing pandemic exemplified the organization’s commitment to being present in Haiti’s hardest moments.
Partners in Health, which operated significant health infrastructure in the Central Plateau and had built relationships across the Haitian health system over three decades, mobilized rapidly to support earthquake response in the southern peninsula. Despite not having pre-existing facilities in the most affected areas, PIH drew on its organizational capacity, its relationships with Haitian health authorities, and its logistical experience to contribute to emergency medical response.
Farmer himself continued to speak and write about Haiti in ways that maintained the country’s visibility in global health and foreign policy discussions. His advocacy emphasized the structural causes of Haiti’s vulnerability — the historical debt payments forced from the country, the international aid failures following 2010, the way that poverty itself was a cause of disease — and insisted that meaningful change required addressing these structural factors rather than simply responding to each successive emergency.
Farmer’s death in February 2022, of cardiac arrest in Rwanda, would be mourned around the world and would prompt reflection on the enormous gap he left in advocacy for the world’s most marginalized populations and specifically for Haiti, a country to which he had devoted his life.