A look at what the WEF says about ending tuberculosis.
Diagnosis and treatment resources were diverted towards managing the pandemic, as spending on TB services worldwide fell from $6 billion in 2019 to $5.4 billion in 2021.
It’s important to keep in mind the numbers in this short paragraph. In two years, well over 10 billion (with a B) dollars was spent on TB issues, and they are even lamenting that it was less because of the Covid pandemic.
And if it was billions in just those two years, we may assume it was billions for many years even before 2020, and billions in the few years since.
There’s still just one licensed vaccine for tuberculosis – BCG, which was first administered in 1921, more than 100 years ago. But it’s only effective in children.
If we can have an effective TB vaccine especially in countries that have a heavy TB burden, that will go a long way to ending the disease, but we urgently need to speed up the development of vaccines. There are 16 TB vaccines in the R&D pipeline but developing them requires funding.
I really can’t claim to understand the whole vaccination development and research and approval thing all that well. But it does strike me as strange that something that been getting billions and billions of dollars over years and decades is still stuck with a vaccine that was developed even before the UN came into being.
Each vaccine takes several hundred million dollars to develop, and despite funding from philanthropic organizations, including the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, there’s still a shortfall because of market forces.
One of the challenges is limited commercial opportunity for TB drugs and vaccines in developed countries which hinders R&D investment in this disease area.
Talking about “limited commercial opportunity” for these vaccines seems like a deflection, given that they admit to already having so very, very much money at their hands. And what is “several hundred million dollars” when you have access to billions?
For myself, I’ve no doubt that TB is a very serious health issue. But I also remember that little chestnut of propaganda from a liberal, “Never let a crisis go to waste”. TB may well be a crisis, especially for certain parts of the world, but in an age of virtue signaling and compassion grandstanding, we are also right to question those who claim to want to help, especially when they are themselves very fat cats either asking us for money or trying to force us to give them money.
No doubt, some part of that billions of dollars is going to things other than vax development, things like medical care, such as facilities and supplies. But even granting that, the numbers are to my mind still suspicious. Because all that money, and only one effective vax that was developed a hundred years ago? Something smells.
.
