The Road Not Taken: If I Were on the Front Lines of the Ebola Crisis

In this series of posts, Influencers explain how their career paths might have changed. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #RoadNotTaken in the body of your post).

For nearly two decades, before I became president of the World Bank Group, my career was defined and driven by work for Partners In Health, an NGO that I founded with my longtime friend Paul Farmer. Both of us were trained in infectious disease medicine as well as in anthropology. We founded Partners In Health on the principle that poor people deserved access to quality health care, and that high quality care can be delivered to the poorest communities.

Paul and I started working in the Central Plateau of Haiti and later expanded to many developing countries. We treated patients for complicated diseases – HIV and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, among them – and fought for policy changes to expand treatment into poor communities, drawing from the evidence of our work.

In 2003, the World Health Organization’s new director-general, J.W. Lee, asked me to serve as a senior advisor, which later turned into a position as director of WHO’s HIV/AIDS Department. That set me on a career path that, with many unexpected twists and some outright surprises, led me away from treating patients in poor communities. In 2009, I was named president of Dartmouth College, and in 2012, I was elected as president of the World Bank Group.

If I had not gone to the World Health Organization, I know where I would I be today: on the front lines of the Ebola crisis in Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone.

I have been intensively involved in the international response to contain Ebola over the past many months. The World Bank Group has committed more than $500 million to fight the crisis. Moreover, our great teams have been at the forefront of the health, economic, and financial responses. My own calendar has been dominated by interventions to find ways to contain this outbreak; I am trying to do all I can to push this response so that the world can stop it before the outbreak does even greater harm to countries in West Africa and beyond.

But I’m not on the ground fighting the disease directly. As I write this in early November, this response more than anything else needs a much larger surge of trained health workers to join their peers and stop this outbreak. We need more health care soldiers to defeat Ebola to treat and prevent the spread of the disease. That would lead to a modern health care response to this outbreak, which would mean higher rates of survival of patients and more treatment of other diseases. And that would give people confidence to seek treatment as early as possible.

Several thousand health workers already have done heroic work in treating and caring for patients, and every single one of them knows the incredible risk before they go. Already, more than 510 health workers have been infected – a greater number alone than the previous largest outbreak of Ebola.

In my job today, I am doing all I can today to blunt the impact on communities and countries, and I know that work is essential. I feel very fortunate to be in this position. But I also know that the doctors, nurses, and other health workers are the true heroes, carrying out the care and treatment we desperately need on a case-by-case basis.

I would have been proud to be a doctor on the front lines of the Ebola crisis. My Plan B is connected to my Plan A: We all need to do whatever we can to stop Ebola.

Photo: Author's Own