How Can a 21st-Century Online Social Movement Advance Global Health Equity?

2025 Symposium

Key Takeaways

Tuberculosis remains deadly not because of scientific gaps, but due to broken systems and global neglect rooted in colonial histories and the devaluation of marginalized lives.
Advocacy, especially online, requires deep listening and a willingness to “pass the megaphone,” amplifying voices that are often unheard rather than dominating the conversation.
Listening is activism. True story-sharing, like sharing the experience of Henry, a young TB survivor Green met at a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019, demands trust, consent, and care—not just broadcasting narratives, but honoring them.
True allyship involves asking, learning, and course-correcting when you get it wrong.
Global health storytelling must move beyond suffering. Advocacy should honor people’s full lives—their joy, culture, and humanity—by responding to real community needs, not assumptions.

“How does a disease [tuberculosis] that has been curable since 1956 infect and potentially kill someone in the year 2025? That’s not a failure of science…it’s a failure of human built systems.” – John Green

Speaker Details

John Green

New York Times bestselling author and philanthropist

John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers, the educational channel Crash Course and an annual livestreamed fundraiser called the Project for Awesome (P4A). John serves on the Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health and, in partnership with PiH and the Nerdfighter community around Vlogbrothers video, has raised over $30 million dollars to tackle maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. In 2023, John spoke at the United Nations calling for the eradication of tuberculosis cases in the next decade. John lives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Carole Mitnick, ScD

Professor, Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Mitnick has worked for more than 25 years to increase access to high-quality, appropriate treatment for TB, especially for drug-resistant TB. Together with collaborators and mentees around the world, she leverages research, training, policy, programmatic support, activism, and advocacy to advance global health equity. Her research includes multi-country clinical trials and observational studies of novel treatments for rifampin-resistant TB. She also works to improve our understanding of post-TB lung impairment: the scale of the problem, how people experience it, and how to care for them. Dr. Mitnick is also Senior Research Associate at Partners In Health and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. She received her doctoral training in international health epidemiology and ecology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.