Dr. Joanne Liu

It was September 2, 2014, at the United Nations, in New York.

Before the representatives of the member states, a physician spoke. She was from Quebec. She was the president of Doctors Without Borders.

Her name was Joanne Liu.

For months, Ebola had been striking West Africa. At least 150 health workers had already died of it. In Monrovia, Liberia, some 800 beds were missing.

She said the world was losing the battle. That states had, in effect, joined a "global coalition of inaction."

Then she said:

The time for meetings and planning was over, she added.

Joanne Liu was born in Quebec City on November 4, 1965. She was the fifth child of a family that had come from Taishan, China, and ran a Chinese restaurant.

At thirteen, she read a book. It told of a doctor with Doctors Without Borders during the Soviet–Afghan War.

She decided then that she, too, would be a doctor without borders.

She studied medicine at McGill University. She trained in pediatrics at CHU Sainte-Justine, in Montreal. Then she specialized in pediatric emergency medicine, in New York.

In 1996, she left on her first mission. In Mauritania, she cared for refugees from Mali.

Other missions followed. The Indian Ocean tsunami. Cholera in Haiti. Somali refugees in Kenya. Palestine, the Central African Republic, Darfur.

In the Republic of the Congo, she helped create one of the first comprehensive care programs for survivors of sexual violence.

From 2002 to 2013, she was a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine. She also chaired the board of MSF Canada, from 2004 to 2009, and helped MSF create a telemedicine project.

In June 2013, MSF elected her international president. She moved to Geneva.

A year later came that speech in New York. From 2014 to 2016, she led MSF's emergency response to the epidemic.

In 2015, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, an MSF hospital was bombed by the US military. Joanne Liu demanded an independent investigation. She spoke of a possible war crime.

In May 2016, she addressed the UN Security Council. She denounced attacks on hospitals.

She left the MSF presidency in 2019.

In 2020 and 2021, she served on the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, co-chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

She became a professor at McGill's School of Population and Global Health. According to the university, she still practises pediatric emergency medicine.

Joanne Liu did not grow up in the tradition of Ubuntu. But her commitment echoes it: the health of a child in Monrovia and that of a child in Montreal are bound together, and no one is safe alone.

Before the states, she had brought numbers, missing beds, and a clock.

A clock ticking for patients and health workers, far from New York.