Tuberculosis kills roughly¹ as many people EVERY YEAR as covid-19 did in 2020. Yet the efforts deployed in fighting them are nowhere comparable.

1. Both counts are probably underestimations, so it's hard to say exactly, but the order of magnitude is around 1.5 to 2M people.

(And that is, of course, a very biased comparison because covid is emerging and TB is already endemic: if we did nothing about covid there is no question that in a few years it would resemble the common cold far more than TB in terms of numbers of deaths.)

There are of course many technical obstacles to developing a highly effective TB vaccine, but I find it hard to believe that if TB had been given every year even a small fraction of the attention that covid has been given this year, considerable progress wouldn't be made by now.

So all of us, and I include myself, who would be tempted to designate covid as the obvious ‘threat of the year’ at least in the ‘respiratory infectious disease’ category, would do well to examine our own biases in evaluating what is important to the mankind.