Ed note: Thanks to Mary M. for letting us know about this documentary now available on Netflix. Paul Farmer who recently died at age 62 was a pioneer in bringing health care to the poor. He was also the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.s
Decades before they launched the first statewide contact tracing program to fight COVID-19 in the United States, and long before they helped battle Ebola in West Africa, three young people barely out of their teens began a movement that would change global health forever. Bending the Arc tells their story.
Not long ago, the public health establishment declared it was impossible to treat poor people suffering from certain deadly diseases. In the 1980s, a fledgling group of unstoppable health advocates set out to change that. Their revolutionary model of training community members as health workers and treating all people with world-class medicine, has forever changed public health.
Bending the Arc is the story of Harvard medical student Paul Farmer, idealistic physician Jim Yong Kim, activist Ophelia Dahl, and the international movement at the center of some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises.