The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
For me, an area of moral clarity is: you’re in front of someone who’s suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.
But if you’re asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.
The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
You can’t have public health without a public health system. We just don’t want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
That’s when I feel most alive, when I’m helping people.
The idea that because you’re born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you’re born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.
I can’t think of a better model for Haiti rebuilding than Rwanda.
We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, ‘What would make this service better for you?’ As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they’re major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.