The Fight to End Tuberculosis
The Challenge
Until recently, tuberculosis (TB), a disease that most often affects the lungs, was the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Now second only to COVID-19, TB still killed around 1.5 million people in 2020, while more than 10 million people fell ill from a disease that is both preventable and curable.
Despite progress in the fight against TB in recent years, the world is still expected to fall short of targets set at the 2018 United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB, where world leaders endorsed an ambitious and powerful political declaration to accelerate progress toward ending TB by 2030. Most experts agree that an effective vaccine against TB is an essential tool to end TB, yet there is currently only one vaccine against TB in existence—the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine—and it is precisely 100 years old. While it protects against severe forms of TB in infants and young children, it offers mostly poor protection against other forms of TB, TB transmission and disease in adolescents and adults.
Despite broad consensus on the need for a new TB vaccine, lack of attention and funding for TB research and development has remained a stumbling block.
Our Approach
Ahead of the 100th anniversary of the BCG vaccine, in July 2021, we worked with the Stop TB Partnership to create an awareness-raising campaign that would call on world leaders to deliver new TB vaccines by 2025 to meet the target to end TB by 2030. One of the campaign’s tactics was to contrast TB vaccine development with the speed at which vaccines were developed for COVID-19, showcasing what can be achieved when the right political will and financial resources are devoted to a disease, and we developed materials that carried that message.
In collaboration with the Stop TB Partnership team, we developed a social media toolkit for partners, which included suggested social media language, as well as a series of graphics and GIFs. We also implemented targeted ads across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to promote the campaign’s messages.
We organized a virtual media briefing, working with the Stop TB Partnership to assemble the panel and then orchestrating the entire call, including the technology, the minute-by-minute run-of-show, holding a prep call for speakers, serving as moderator and reaching out to media to encourage them to attend.
Impact
The virtual media briefing was attended by journalists from across Africa as well as India and the United States, and our media outreach resulted in stories in EuroNews, El Pais, Politico and Xinhua, among others, reaching policymakers and funders in many of the Stop TB Partnership’s priority countries.
The social media toolkit received high engagement, and social listening found that posts associated with the campaign garnered a reach of almost 3 million.