John Dickerson interviewed John Green about Green’s 2025 book Everything Is Tuberculosis for the CBS Evening News on March 18, 2025. Dickinson introduced the segment: “You may think tuberculosis is an antique disease, something that happened somewhere else in the past or in a distant place. Not so. Tuberculosis is the most deadly infectious disease in the world. More than a million people a year still die from TB cases. In the United States, the CDC reports cases of the deadly lung infection have increased more than 15% in 2023 compared to the year before.”
Before writing the book, John posted:
Mar 28, 2023: My Tuberculosis Reading List. In which John shares three of his favorites from the dozens of books and articles he has recently read about the wild history and infuriating present of tuberculosis. BOOKS: Stigmatized by Handaa Enkh-Amgalan. Phantom Plague by Vidya Krishnan includes the story of Shreya Tripathi and so much fascinating history. As for Paul Farmer’s “Social Scientists and the New Tuberculosis,” it should be available in most libraries, and it’s really, really worth reading.
The intro of the book shares the stories of James Watt’s son and John’s great-uncle, both of whom succumbed to TB.
May 25, 2023: Did TB Cause World War I? Kinda? Maybe? In which John discusses the consumptive circumstances that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of World War I. The darkly comical story is outlined in the second chapter of the book. Conversely, hat creator John Stetson and specific geographies, such as New Mexico, thrived.
Henry Reider
In Chapter 1, John introduces us to Henry. He has the same first name as John’s nine-year-old son. His story flows throughout the book.
Aug 15, 2023: Henry. In which John at last reveals why he is obsessed with tuberculosis. Dr Girum Tefera explained to me that Henry was among the first to receive bedaquiline and the first to receive a different med that allowed him to take it safely. Thanks so, so much to Henry for his openness, generosity, and friendship, and to Dr. Girum Tefera and his colleagues at Lakka for working so relentlessly, under challenging circumstances, to advocate for and treat people living with TB. Thanks also to everyone at Partners in Health for introducing me to Henry and to their incredibly important work with TB survivors.
John notes in a chapter titled That Wealth Never Warded Off: “It is an interesting observation of human history that we focus so little on disease… TB is one of the few infectious diseases present in both the Americas and Afroeurasia before the Columbian Exchange before 1492… Tuberculosis is listed in Guinness World Records as the oldest contagious disease.”
How the disease was perceived varied over time. In 18th and 19th-century Europe and the US, the “tuberculous personality” was a ‘divine compensation’; their lives are shortened physically but quickened psychically in a ratio inversely as the shortening.”
It was considered as “The White Man’s Plague,” with other races thought to have some other disease. But after the German doctor isolated the mycobacterium tuberculosis organism in 1882, suddenly, racialized medicine declared that a high rate of TB among black people was a sign of white superiority.
DOT
From the CDC, mentioned in the book: “The most effective strategy to ensure treatment adherence is directly observed therapy (DOT). DOT means that a health care worker or another designated person watches the TB patient swallow each dose of the prescribed drugs. During DOT encounters, the health care worker also asks the patient about any problems or side effects with the medication.”
John Green’s post of Jul 11, 2023: Barely Contained Rage. An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing threat, and bedaquiline is essential to curing it. Generic bedaquiline will drive down the cost of the drug by over 60%, allowing far more communities to access and distribute treatment. Evergreening the patent will cost so many lives over the next four years, which Johnson & Johnson knows. They must drop their efforts to enforce the secondary patents.
Ju1 28, 2023: Tuberculosis Fighters Have a Posse. In which John makes an unscripted video about how diseases need ‘a constituency,’ and how activists working together across the globe really can dramatically lower the burden of an illness and increase the availability of treatment. This week, I’ve been reminded of an old adage: Never underestimate nerdfighteria.
TB Heroes
Sep 14, 2023: Talking Tuberculosis, GeneXpert, J&J, and more with MY HEROES: Join John Green as he moderates a discussion on tuberculosis diagnostics and treatment. We’re discussing Danaher’s price-gouging on tuberculosis tests, the importance of universal access to bedaquiline, and so much more with some of John’s heroes — including Nandita Venkatesan, Phumeza Tusile, and Dr. Animesh Sinha. Thanks to Doctors without Borders (http://msf.org) and Partners in Health (http://pih.org) for making this event possible. Learn more about our community’s fight for accessible diagnostics and treatment at https://tbfighters.org/.
Sep 19, 2023: So, um…. GOOD NEWS?!?!?! In which John is a bit surprised to have such good news to share–while also acknowledging this isn’t over. Learn more about the deal struck between Danaher and the Global Fund, the Stop TB Partnership, and USAID. This is very good news for people living with tuberculosis and significantly expands testing capabilities. But it also isn’t the end. Further progress could be made, especially with extensively drug-resistant TB test cartridges–and we should advocate for that respectfully and compassionately.
UN?
Sep 27, 2023: John Goes … to the UNITED NATIONS? In which John attends the United Nations’ High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis and gives a speech arguing that, in the 21st century, the cure needs to be where the disease is.
Dec 5, 2023: MASSIVE Tuberculosis News. In which John talks about the recently ended TB trials and what they mean for the future of people living with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis–and also what it means that it took us so long to find a faster, less toxic, better, and less expensive cure for MDR-TB (multiple drug resistant).
Mar 12, 2024: How We End TB. In which John discusses how we ended tuberculosis once and can end it again. Of the 10 million people who get sick with tuberculosis every year, four million go undiagnosed. Every year that an infection goes undiagnosed and untreated, the disease spreads to between 5 and 15 more people. Every $1 invested in TB care and prevention generates $43 in economic benefit.
Mar 19, 2024: Our $80,000,000 Bet. In which John discusses the announcement of a new project to bring comprehensive tuberculosis care to parts of the Philippines as a blueprint to show what is possible.
Crash Course
Mar 25, 2024:The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time | Crash Course Lecture. Tuberculosis is often thought of as an old-timey disease, but in reality, it continues to kill over a million and a half people per year, despite its known cure. How did we get here, to a world where decades of work toward a cure stalled in its dissemination around the globe? And how can understanding the history of TB point us toward a different future? If you’ve been following author and TB-hater John Green in any way for the last year or so, this video is the deep dive you’ve been waiting for…
Feb 25, 2025: EVERYTHING IS TUBERCULOSIS: In which John reads the first chapter of Everything Is Tuberculosis, his seventh book. You can order EITB at http://everythingistb.com or wherever books are sold. Yes, there is an audiobook, and yes, it’s narrated by John!
The Daily Show
May 7, 2025: John Green – “Everything Is Tuberculosis” | The Daily Show. “This is the middle of the story, not the end of the story, and it falls on us to write a better end.” John Green, an award-winning author and global healthcare reform advocate, sits down with Desi Lydic to discuss his No. 1 New York Times bestseller, “Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.” He explains how DOGE cuts are affecting global aid – The USAID cuts taking place after the book’s publication will almost certainly cause hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, and the need for political will, and the infection’s connection to everything, from the cowboy hat to weighted vests.
I’ve chosen to focus on the Vlogbrothers video and the Crash Course video because most of the narratives, save for the Philippines story, appear in some form in the book. This is based on my book review of Everything Is Tuberculosis, given at the Albany Public Library on Tuesday, November 25, 2025.
In conclusion
I liked the book quite a bit. I do agree with David Burton’s 4-star (out of 5) review on Arts Hub. “Green covers a lot of ground in a relatively short volume. It’s a wonder the work never feels superficial. Instead, it is forensic, told with Green’s signature wit and compassion. The only flaw is a matter of structure. Green’s book has almost no signposting for the reader, and so they are thrust from page to page with breathless intensity. It dampens the full strength of his argument a little, which could do with an occasional pause and summary before plunging ever onward.” Even though it was a 200-page book, I could have used an index as well.
The day of my presentation, a new video, Poverty Is Expensive, dropped, “in which John tells a story about Henry and Isatu Reider’s attempt to visit Denmark for a tuberculosis conference.”
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