Abraar Karan is an American global health physician and researcher. He was active in the COVID-19 epidemic response in Massachusetts and involved nationally through his contributions to lay press media platforms. He is a columnist at the British Medical Journal, a contributor at the National Public Radio, and regularly writes in the lay press.
Education
Karan attended Yale University, where he graduated with distinction in Political Science. During college, Karan worked in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Uganda, and India on public health research focused on the links between poverty, structural violence, and health. He also studied as a Yale Journalism Scholar under former New York Times Executive Editor, Jill Abramson.
Karan was awarded a Yale Parker Huang Fellowship, which supported a year of research in Hyderabad and New Delhi, India, exploring the Stockholm Syndrome among female sex workers, as well as sex trafficking victims in red light districts. Along with Dr. Nathan Hansen, Karan proposed the term “Sonagachi Syndrome” to describe the psychological dependency that victims of sex trafficking at times display to their captors, named after Sonagachi, India's largest red light district.
Medical and public health training
Karan earned his doctorate in medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he served as Class President. During medical school, Karan worked at the United States CDC in Mozambique and at the Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. He was selected as a 2016 medical fellow at the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Medical Ethics.
He went on to earn an MPH in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. During graduate school, with his college roommate Andrew Rothaus, Karan co-founded Hour72 insect repellent, for which the pair won the Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition, and were finalists in the Harvard President's Challenge.
Karan trained in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in the Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity established by Dr. Howard Hiatt and Dr. Paul Farmer. Karan earned his Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM&H) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2019. He is an infectious diseases fellow and post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University.
Journalism and writing
Karan is the co-editor of the book, Protecting the Health of the Poor: Social Movements in the Global South, with ethicist Dr. Thomas Pogge. Karan went on to work as the editor on two global health works with the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics. In 2016-17, Karan led the theme issue on international healthcare systems, and in 2019-20 on pandemic response.
Karan has written about neocolonialism in global health, and has been critical of the current global health enterprise. Karan has been a columnist at the British Medical Journal since January 2019. He became a contributor to NPR during COVID-19, helping with weekly COVID-19 FAQs, on NPR All Things Considered with Ari Shapiro, and NPR Weekend Edition.
COVID-19 response
Karan was active in the Massachusetts COVID-19 epidemic response as a medical fellow working with Commissioner Monica Bharel in the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Karan was a member of the Crisis Standard of Care Committee, and also worked on the allocation of scarce resources in the state response, including ventilators and Remdesivir.
Prior to the first COVID-19 surge, Karan wrote about the need for doctors to discuss code status with their high-risk patients in advance to plan for end-of-life care given high rates of ventilator deaths. He was a proponent of the Black Lives Matter protests as being key to bringing attention toward the racial inequities in COVID-19 outcomes in the US. Karan wrote in the Washington Post that central isolation options were a key part of breaking chains of disease transmission after he noted that many of his patients were unable to safely isolate. He opined against the early xenophobia against Asians; in favor of a diverse range of expert voices in pandemic response; and warned that stigma could obstruct the success of contact tracing efforts.