The head of a global partnership to end tuberculosis (TB) said she is “sickened” by research that revealed millions more people are expected to contract the disease as a result of Covid-19 restrictions.

Up to 6.3 million more people are predicted to develop TB between now and 2025 and 1.4 million more people are expected to die as cases go undiagnosed and untreated during lockdown. This will set back global efforts to end TB by five to eight years.

“The fact that we’ve rolled back to 2013 figures and we have so many people dying, this for me is sickening,” said Lucica Ditiu, executive director of the Stop TB Partnership. “I am outraged that just by not being able to control what we do … and forgetting about programmes that exist we lose so much, starting with the loss of the lives of people.”

“I have to say we look from the TB community in a sort of puzzled way because TB has been around for thousands of years,” Ditiu said. “For 100 years we have had a vaccine and we have two or three potential vaccines in the pipeline. We need around half a billion [people] to get the vaccine by 2027 and we look in amazement on a disease that … is 120 days old and it has 100 vaccine candidates in the pipeline. So I think this world, sorry for my French, is really fucked up,” she said.

Issue is that tuberculosis is not so simple illness as told here, as it frequently develops into full fledged infection due to low life level, lack of vitamins and good food, lack of sun, big stress. And lot of people have virus all their life and nothing happens. So it is quite stupid to try to cure it with vaccines only.