House Senior Deputy Speaker and former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said the Philippines can apply lessons learned from handling the nightmare that is the Covid-19 pandemic in the fight against another deadly disease--tuberculosis.

Arroyo had this to say during her participation as a panelist in the Washington Post-sponsored forum on "Ending Tuberculosis" last Tuesday Jan. 17.

The forum was held on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

“Covid was a bad experience but in a way, it also taught the other things that we can apply to other things, like tuberculosis," Arroyo, who represents Pampanga's 2nd district in Philippine Congress, said.

“Our experience in Covid taught us some things in our country that we can apply to fighting tuberculosis. One is that vaccines are a game-changer," she noted.

"We saw that it was game-changing in the case of Covid, it can be a game-changer in the case of tuberculosis," said Arroyo, who is also a former House Speaker.

"And the other thing that COVID taught us in our country was that when you had strong public-private sector partnership, for instance in the testing and the vaccines, they can work. So we can do that too for tuberculosis,” Arroyo further said.

At any rate, the lady official said she is "very inspired that since we are giving attention again to tuberculosis".

"I certainly would like to be able to experiment or to the model testing and vaccines in my own constituency, with the help of WHO (World Health Organization) and the NGOs (non-government organizations) that are fighting tuberculosis," she said.