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A vaccine against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, has never been closer to reality, with the potential to save millions of lives. But its development slowed after its corporate owner focused on more profitable vaccines.
www.propublica.org
Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis (
Φυματιωση), the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.
So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.
The results blew him away:
The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century.
He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.
Weeks passed. Then months.
More than five years after the call, he’s still waiting, because the company that owns the vaccine decided to prioritize far more lucrative business.
As the London-based company turned away from its vaccine for TB, a disease that kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year, it went all in on a vaccine against
shingles (
Ερπητα ζωστηρα), a viral infection that comes with a painful rash. It afflicts mostly older people who, in the U.S., are largely covered by government insurance. Importantly, the shingles vaccine shared a key ingredient with the TB shot, a component that enhanced the effectiveness of both but was in limited supply.
From a business standpoint, GSK’s decision made sense. Shingrix would become what the company calls a “crown jewel,” raking in more than
$14 billion since 2018.
www.nobelprize.org
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