Reimagine: Covid-19

Epidode One with Paul Farmer

Reimagine Podcast 1

“Shame on us if we cannot seize this moment to make some desperately needed improvements in our health systems.”

For years, many in global health have been saying that “the big one” - a pandemic disease - was a matter of when, not if. And this is the big one.  So we changed our schedule to start the new series of Reimagine with a special emergency podcast on the coronavirus pandemic with the public health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer.

Paul is an infectious disease doctor and anthropologist who co-founded Partners In Health, a global health and social justice organisation that works with governments and communities around the world to make high quality healthcare accessible to everyone, especially the poorest. He is a university professor at Harvard, where he Chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.

Peter Drobac, Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Paul have been colleagues, friends and fellow troublemakers for 20 years. They look back to explore what past epidemics can teach us and ahead to how this pandemic might define us. What can lessons from Ebola teach us about how to effectively deal with Covid-19? And is this the moment to rebuild our human social architecture to ensure fatalities on this scale never happen again?

Reimagine is a new original podcast series from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, in partnership with Oxford Answers. Social entrepreneurs are in the business of building better futures. While most of us see only symptoms, they look at the whole system. And by reframing a problem – seeing things differently – we can begin to reimagine what’s possible. Unlocking this process of discovery is what Reimagine is all about.

Dr Paul Farmer passed away in Rwanda on 21 February 2022. 

Produced by Eve Streeter for Stabl and Saïd Business School.