TAG Launches New Report on Strengthening Community Engagement in Preparations for New TB Vaccines

25 January 2026

Treatment Action Group (TAG) announced the launch of its new report, What Could Go Right: Vital Partnerships with Communities and Civil Society for New Tuberculosis Vaccines.

The promise of an effective TB vaccine — the first in more than a century — may be realized as soon as 2028. Potential new TB vaccines intended for adults and adolescents would radically improve the chance to eliminate TB, the world’s leading cause of death from an infectious disease.

Communities and civil society organizations are poised to play an indispensable role in ensuring the success of new TB vaccines by building the “infrastructures of trust” that are foundational to vaccine acceptance, demand, and equitable access.

What Could Go Right: Vital Partnerships with Communities and Civil Society for New Tuberculosis Vaccines, written together with community partners and supported by Wellcome, explores the indispensable role of communities and civil society in preparing the way for new TB vaccines and ensuring their success once they become available. The report brings together three unique studies that assess the readiness of community and civil society to contribute to TB vaccine policymaking and implementation at national, regional, and global levels, and the investments funders should make to strengthen community capacity and engagement.

No Vaccines Without Us: A Global Landscape Analysis of Civil Society Engagement in TB Vaccine Preparedness is based on a global survey of 125 civil society organizations active in the TB response in 42 countries and documents the readiness of CSOs to participate in new TB vaccine policymaking, demand creation, and implementation.
Seven Country Policy Portraits, written by local activists, illustrate how vaccine policy is made in seven countries — Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Malawi, Mongolia, South Africa, and Vietnam — and propose reforms to strengthen the representation of community partners in national immunization decision making.
TB Vaccine Access in “4D”: A Roadmap Charting Civil Society Actions for Equitable Access outlines a series of actions civil society can take with the support of other key stakeholders to assure access to new TB vaccines along four dimensions: development, delivery, demand, and data.

The research reveals that communities are poised to play an indispensable role in new TB vaccine planning and introduction but require immediate investment to be optimally activated. While nearly all surveyed organizations express interest in TB vaccine preparedness, only around one-fifth feel “fully prepared” to engage. Yet, these organizations possess strong foundations: the vast majority have more than five years of TB experience, have previous experience with TB prevention activities, and work directly with TB survivors and people at risk. With targeted capacity-building and well-designed investments, civil society can do its part to ensure effective and culturally acceptable vaccine introduction and scale-up to achieve a major public health goal — the end of TB.

Join TAG on Wednesday, January 28 at 8:00 – 9:30 EDT | 14:00 – 15:30 CET | 16:00 – 17:30 EAT | 19:00 – 20:30 PM ICT for a webinar discussing findings from What Could Go Right and the path forward to capacitating and engaging community and civil society towards the introduction of a future TB vaccine. Interpretation services will be available in Russian and French.

Register for the webinar here.

Source: Treatment Action Group