David Nabarro

Sir David Nunes Nabarro (born 26 August 1949) is a British Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization.

He has made his career in the international civil service, working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization.

He attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, leaving in the summer of 1966.

In a gap year between school and university, Nabarro was a community service volunteer.

He spent a year as the organiser of Youth Action, York.

A BBC television documentary was made about his volunteer work.

Nabarro studied at the University of Oxford and the University of London, and qualified as a physician in 1973.

He is a member of the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) and the Royal College of Physicians by distinction (where he is also a Fellow).

Nabarro worked as a medical officer in North Iraq for Save the Children, before joining the United Kingdom's (UK) National Health Service (NHS) for a short time.

From 1976 to 1978, Nabarro worked as District Child Health Officer in Dhankuta District, Nepal.

Later, he moved to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in 1982, he became Regional Manager for the Save the Children Fund in South Asia, based in the region.

In 1985 he joined the University of Liverpool Medical School as senior lecturer in International Community Health.

He moved to the Overseas Development Administration (now part of Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) as a strategic adviser for health and population in East Africa, based in Nairobi, in 1989.

Nabarro later took up the post of chief health and population adviser at the Overseas Development Administration (London office) in 1990, and moved on to become director of human development (as well as chief health adviser) in 1997.

The blast targeted the UN, which had used the hotel as its headquarters in Iraq since 1991.

Nabarro joined the WHO in January 1999, as project manager of Roll Back Malaria, then moved to the Office of the Director General as executive director in March 2000.

In this capacity, he worked with the director general Gro Harlem Brundtland for two years on a variety of issues, including the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, Health Systems Assessments and the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

As part of this work, he became for 1999-2001 a member of the board of directors of Medicines for Malaria Venture.

Nabarro transferred to the Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments cluster in 2003 and was appointed representative of the DG for health action in crises in July 2003.

Nabarro was stationed in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq, when it was bombed on the afternoon of 19 August 2003.

He has also coordinated support for health aspects of crisis response operations in Darfur, Sudan, and in countries affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Tsunami.

In September 2005, Nabarro was seconded from WHO and appointed senior UN system coordinator for avian and human influenza by secretary-general of the UN Kofi Annan to ensure that the UN system made an effective and coordinated contribution to the global effort to control the epidemic of avian influenza (also known as 'bird flu').

In January 2009, Nabarro took on the responsibility of coordinating the UN system's High-Level Task Force on Global Food Security (HLTF).

The HLTF brought together 23 different organizations, funds, programs and other entities from within the UN family, as well as the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and tasked them with establishing a common strategy for addressing food and nutrition insecurity in a more sustainable, coordinated and comprehensive way.

In November 2009 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Nabarro as special representative on food security and nutrition.

As special representative, Nabarro's role was to:

In September 2010, Nabarro was appointed coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement.

SUN brings together government officials, civil society, the UN, donors, businesses and researchers in a collective effort to improve nutrition.

The epidemic is believed to have begun in December 2013 with the death of a 2-year-old boy in a remote area of Guinea, but was not recognized until March 2014.

For several months the epidemic was spreading.

This is something that public health experts in the affected locations, such as Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), claimed was due to a deeply flawed and delayed response by health and government officials.

Nabarro left the HLTF coordinator position in 2014 and was succeeded by Giuseppe Fantozzi.

In August 2014, Nabarro was designated as special envoy of the UN Secretary-General on Ebola, with the responsibility for ensuring that the UN system makes an effective and coordinated contribution to the global effort to control the outbreak of Ebola.

In an interview later in 2015, once Ebola had largely been brought under control, Nabarro said that when he started working on Ebola in 2014, he "was aware that we were in the middle of a disease outbreak of enormous proportions. The number of people getting sick was doubling every week. Facilities were completely overloaded. Communities were in a state of despair."

He added that the international community had learned important lessons from the epidemic: "The world is going to be different as a result of this Ebola outbreak, much more confident, much more assured, and much, much more capable to ensure the well-being of its citizens."

Nabarro was responsible for leading a high-level advisory group to guide reform of WHO's response to outbreaks and emergencies, prepare reports based on the group's recommendations and advise on the manner of their implementation.

Betimes, he became Member of the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (2016), 2013–2014.

Since February 2020, he has helped the DGWHO deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nabarro is the son of the late Sir John David Nunes Nabarro, whose cousin was the late Sir Gerald Nabarro, MP.

He was formerly consultant endocrinologist at University College Hospital (UCH) and Middlesex Hospital, London.