Sir David Nunes Nabarro KCMG CBE (born 26 August 1949) is a British Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization.

[1] He has made his career in the international civil service, working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization.

[4] Nabarro worked as a medical officer in North Iraq for Save the Children, before joining the United Kingdom's (UK) National Health Service (NHS) for a short time.

[6] Nabarro transferred to the Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments cluster in 2003 and was appointed representative of the DG for health action in crises in July 2003.

He has also coordinated support for health aspects of crisis response operations in Darfur, Sudan, and in countries affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Tsunami.

[10] In January 2009, Nabarro took on the responsibility of coordinating the UN system's High-Level Task Force on Global Food Security (HLTF).

[11] The HLTF brought together 23 different organizations, funds, programs and other entities from within the UN family, as well as the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),[12] and tasked them with establishing a common strategy for addressing food and nutrition insecurity in a more sustainable, coordinated and comprehensive way.

[14] SUN brings together government officials, civil society, the UN, donors, businesses and researchers in a collective effort to improve nutrition.

He added that the international community had learned important lessons from the epidemic: "The world is going to be different as a result of this Ebola outbreak, much more confident, much more assured, and much, much more capable to ensure the well-being of its citizens.

Pedro Modrano Rojas previously served as a senior coordinator for the cholera effort, but left at the end of an 18-month term, stating that he was disappointed by the international community's "failure to acknowledge the fact that we have in Haiti the largest epidemic in the western hemisphere.

[26] In September 2016, Nabarro was nominated by the UK's First May ministry to stand for the post of director-general (DG) of the World Health Organization (WHO).

[32] In October 2020, Nabarro gave an interview with The Spectator on YouTube in which he highlighted the WHO's updated position on lockdowns in regards to national responses to COVID.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, he cautioned against a full national lockdown, describing it as "a very extreme restriction on economic and social life" that temporarily "freezes the virus in place".

Because in the end living with the virus as a constant threat means maintaining the capacity to find people with the disease and isolating them."