David Nabarro, a health expert who helped lead the United Nations response to a panoply of crises that have shown how a globalized world remains vulnerable to primitive contagions — including the avian flu, Ebola and the coronavirus pandemic — died on Friday at his home in Ferney-Voltaire, France, a suburb of Geneva. He was 75.
An announcement by 4SD Foundation, a consulting group he ran with his wife, Florence Lasbennes, said his death was sudden but did not cite a cause.
Dr. Nabarro, a British-born physician, was an expert on epidemics and a wizard of organizing, with a résumé of campaigns in some of the world’s most troubled places at moments of maximum peril.
He worked in Haiti during a cholera outbreak in 2016, in Baghdad during the Iraq War and in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic of 2014.
He was widely known in global health circles, and in 2017 was runner-up to become director general of the World Health Organization, losing in a vote by the health ministers of 186 nations to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia.
“David was a great champion of global health and health equity, and a wise, generous mentor to countless individuals,” Dr. Tedros wrote on social media over the weekend. “His work touched and impacted so many lives across the world.”
Dr. Nabarro’s deep voice, which resembled that of Boris Karloff, was “perfect for an expert in epidemics,” the health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. wryly noted in The New York Times, adding, “If he read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ it would sound like ‘The Doomsday Chronicles.’”
In 2003, Dr. Nabarro survived a truck bombing at the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that killed 23 people.
He had joined the W.H.O., the U.N. agency that is the world’s pre-eminent respondent to health emergencies, in 1999. His first assignment was coordinating the war on malaria, a leading killer of the poorest people, especially children.
In 2005, Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations put Dr. Nabarro in charge of responding to avian influenza, which was devastating bird populations around the world and which some experts feared might jump to humans and set off a pandemic. Those fears have not yet materialized.
But in 2014, when Dr. Nabarro was named the U.N.’s special envoy on Ebola, the human toll was all too real. More than 10,000 people perished in the outbreak, primarily in three West African countries.
To contain Ebola, which kills on average half of those who become infected, the W.H.O. rolled out the largest emergency response in its history, involving more than 700 aid workers at 77 field sites. It was a coordinated effort by many nations, a feat that Dr. Nabarro, who provided strategic and policy direction for the international response, called “amazing.”
He contrasted it several years later with the disjointed global response to Covid-19, lamenting the warping influence of politics.
“There has been a funny shift between 2015, when I was working on Ebola, and 2020 to ’21, working on Covid,” he told NPR in 2021. “And it’s this — I find that world leaders are just no longer apparently able to work together and deal with this problem through a global response.”
A comment that Dr. Nabarro, a U.N. special envoy on Covid, made about the role of lockdowns in October 2020 was seized on, and distorted, by President Trump.
The World Health Organization “just came out a little while ago and they admitted that Donald Trump was right,” said the president, who had opposed shutting down businesses in the early months of the pandemic. “The lockdowns are doing tremendous damage to these Democrat-run states.”
Dr. Nabarro had said that lockdowns should not be “the primary means of control” of Covid-19, but should be used to “buy you time” to protect exhausted health workers. He compared lockdowns to “circuit breakers” that had a role in containing the virus, saying they should be part of a “middle path” that was more restrictive than letting the virus spread freely to build herd immunity — the approach that Mr. Trump and his advisers favored.
While Dr. Nabarro was prized at the U.N. for his communications skills, and his punchy statements were often quoted by the press, he was also sometimes accused of being an alarmist.
In 2005, he predicted that H5N1 avian flu might kill up to 150 million people. The year before, when he led the W.H.O.’s response to a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, he warned that deaths from cholera and malaria could kill tens of thousands. And he claimed that 10,000 people a month were dying in Darfur refugee camps in 2004 because the Sudanese government was blocking aid.
As of 2009, only about 260 deaths had been attributed to the H5N1 virus, which has not mutated into a strain that transmits easily between people. And three months after the Indian Ocean tsunami, the W.H.O. said there had been no major disease outbreaks.
Dr. Nabarro defended himself in an interview in The Times in 2006, saying that on avian flu, he had predicted a range of five million to 150 million human deaths, but that headline writers had plucked out the higher number; that the world’s generosity in sending aid after the tsunami had held down deaths from disease; and that he had been right about Darfur.
David Nunes Nabarro was born on Aug. 26, 1949, in London, to John Nabarro and Joan Cockrell, both physicians. He attended Oxford University, earning a B.A. in animal physiology and chemistry in 1970, and a medical degree in 1974. He also received a master’s degree in public health in 1974 from London University.
He first worked in the field in that year, as a medical officer for the nonprofit organization Save the Children in northern Iraq. In the 1990s, he worked for the British government’s foreign aid agency in East Africa.
After leaving the W.H.O. in 2017, Dr. Nabarro and Ms. Lasbennes, an agronomist, started 4SD Foundation, a consulting firm focused on global sustainable development.
Besides Ms. Lasbennes, whom he married in 2019, he is survived by three children from a relationship with Dr. Susanna Graham-Jones, Thomas, Oliver and Polly Nabarro; two children from his marriage to Gillian Holmes, Josephine and Lucas Nabarro; and seven grandchildren.
Princess Anne of Britain knighted Dr. Nabarro in 2023 for his contributions during the coronavirus pandemic.
And in 2018, he received the World Food Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of food and agriculture, for leading a global response at the U.N. to malnutrition and lack of food that stunted children’s growth in poor countries. As a result of his efforts, according to the citation for the award, the number of children under 5 who were too short for their age decreased by 10 million across the world.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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