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End of a Rough Year

2023-12-19 · letter vlog · John · 5:04 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Global development (also: Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Personal essay · tags: heavy topic, timely hook, civic or action cta

Ending a rough 2023, John finds hope in collaboration: Danaher's drug-resistance TB test cartridges are the product of multi-generational research, yet TB activists disagree with Danaher over the price of the drug-resistant cartridge; Danaher is not the enemy, TB is, and to hope is to refuse to accept the world as it is.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A rough year ends; the Time for Five campaign's ads and the amazing TB test cartridges

  • ★★ John says this is his last normal video of 2023, a rough year he won't be sad to leave, and he has been thinking a lot about where to find hope. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John reports that the Time for Five coalition of TB activists is drawing attention to the price of drug-resistant TB test cartridges with ads on bike shares, a bus stop near the maker's headquarters and in today's Washington Post. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ John says the test cartridges are amazing: within a couple of hours caregivers know which antibiotics a person's TB will respond to, so it can usually be cured within six to nine months. — 00:00:29 · tuberculosis

00:00:58 — Phumeza Tisile's treatment before the test existed; the test as the fruit of research and multi-generational collaboration

  • ★★ John says TB survivor Phumeza Tisile took 20 to 30 thousand pills over three years and eight months of drug-resistant TB treatment and lost her hearing to a drug she didn't need, because the test didn't exist then. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says the test's existence is cause for hope and celebration and a testament to research, the scientific method, the sharing of knowledge and the talent and hard work of Cepheid's people. — 00:01:13 · hope
  • ★★ John says that because he hasn't been good at being hopeful lately, he hasn't spent enough time marveling at the multi-generational global collaboration behind this progress. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ John says that without the identification of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in 1882 and ever better strategies to kill it, TB would not be curable today. — 00:01:40 · tuberculosis

00:01:56 — Hope found in community and collaboration; collaboration means respectful disagreement

  • ★★★ John says he finds hope in community and collaboration, in making meaning together by making change together: in the 'we's of his life, TB fighters, Nerdfighteria, his family and Indianapolis. — 00:01:56 · hope, collective action, Nerdfighteria, Indianapolis

  • ★★ John says he looks for hope in collaboration and community because there people together can battle what Kurt Vonnegut called the terrible disease of loneliness, as well as TB and other injustice. — 00:02:12 · collective action, tuberculosis

    “the terrible disease of loneliness”

  • ★★★ John says collaboration doesn't mean never disagreeing but often disagreeing, respectfully, empathetically and passionately; divergent values and perspectives among many people are not just okay but essential. — 00:02:26 · collective action

00:02:55 — The disagreement with Danaher over the drug-resistant TB cartridge price; Danaher is not the enemy

  • ★★★ John says Danaher and Cepheid lowered the price of their standard TB test cartridge and pledged no profit on it in low- and middle-income countries, but have not lowered the price of the drug-resistant TB cartridge. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ John says that as TB fighters their only priority is lowering the global burden of tuberculosis, best achieved through cheaper and more abundant testing, though Danaher's choice may make sense from its perspective. — 00:03:00 · tuberculosis
  • ★★★ John says Danaher is not the enemy, tuberculosis is; to end TB we need each other, and together we can drive costs down further and make testing more affordable. — 00:03:24 · tuberculosis, collective action
  • ★★ John asks whether his hope is naive and says he doesn't think so, because he has seen hope realized before. — 00:03:35 · hope
  • ★★★ John calls it unacceptable that 200,000 people will die of drug-resistant TB this year (2023), most never able to get one of the molecular tests because there aren't enough. — 00:03:40
  • ★★ John says that with existing resources twice as many people could be tested, and Danaher could still make money, if the tests cost half as much. — 00:03:56

00:04:22 — Hank's and John's hard year; the capacities for collaboration and hope; sign-off

  • ★★ John says Danaher can, and he believes will, be an ally in the fight to get more tests to more people more affordably. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ John tells Hank this has surely been the hardest year of Hank's life, brutal, and one of the hardest of John's own. — 00:04:25 · Hank Green
  • ★★★ John says he ends the year feeling that two human capacities carried both brothers and the broader us this far: collaboration and hope. — 00:04:35 · collective action, hope

  • ★★★ John defines hope as refusing to accept the world as it is, and says only through collaboration can we bring about a better world. — 00:04:50 · hope, collective action

    “To hope is to refuse to accept the world as it is”

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description points viewers to TB Fighters' work and asks them to join its Discord, telling Danaher it's time for five. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: collective action · Danaher Corporation · hope · multidrug-resistant tuberculosis · tuberculosis

Also: People: Kurt Vonnegut · Phumeza Tisile

Projects: TBFighters

Organizations: The Washington Post · Time for Five

Concepts: cumulative culture · loneliness · Mycobacterium tuberculosis · scientific method

Places: Indianapolis

Only in the description or credits: Cepheid · Discord

Also centred on Danaher Corporation: Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Danaher and Cepheid · Talking Tuberculosis, GeneXpert, J&J, and more with MY HEROES · So, um.... GOOD NEWS?!?!?! · I Own Danaher · Is It 2010? IT'S A PARTS VIDEO · I Don't Want them to Get Away With It…

Also centred on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson · Talking Tuberculosis, GeneXpert, J&J, and more with MY HEROES · MASSIVE Tuberculosis News · ITS ALL HAPPENING · Real Reasons for Hope

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