In an editorial in the World Health Organization Bulletin in 2003, he criticized those in the public-health community who pushed for HIV prevention rather than care in poor countries because it was cheaper (P. Farmer Bull. In the early days of PIH in the 1990s, he and co-founder Jim Yong Kim smuggled some US$92,000worth of second-line tuberculosis drugs out of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where they both worked, to their patients in Peru, according to a profile in The New Yorker. (A PIH donor later reimbursed the hospital for the drugs.) Years later, Farmer and Kim threw their support behind an ambitious World Health Organization initiative to treat three million people with HIV/AIDS by 2005.
Paul Farmer (1959-2022).