The Vaccine Co-op: Revolutionizing COVID-19 Recovery
A Vaccine Co-Op would be a game-changer to allow us to get vaccinated faster, cheaper, and better while growing infrastructure that is more resilient to the next pandemic or trade war.
Like many others grasping for immunity conferred by recently released COVID vaccines, I too have been asking around if I might be able to participate through informal “friends-and-family” programs being informally administered by some area hospitals in the Boston, USA area, where I have been sheltering during the pandemic. These ad-hoc programs apparently enable providers to offload vaccine shots when they are unable to deliver them to patients in remote locations that are part of these providers’ allocations. My inquiries have been an exercise in futility. Even friends who should be “eligible” because they are healthcare workers have reported innumerable difficulties in scheduling their shots due to challenges with the online systems that providers use for this purpose.
These wretched experiences got me thinking and actually imagining the following scenario: on a day this week, you reach out to your personal digital assistant and say “Alexa, schedule a vaccine shot for me this week” to have Alexa pipe up with: “at home or at your preferred pharmacy?”
This seemingly fantastical notion can become a reality if vaccine production, access, and distribution are organized through infrastructure whose elements are available to us NOW. This article lays out the elements of that infrastructure which can be organized as a “cooperative” aka “co-op”.
Co-ops have been around for decades — whether it is to streamline aggregation and distribution of agricultural production or provide mutual insurance facilities for members. They have been receiving renewed interest more recently from experts such as Alex Pentland, a co-creator of the MIT Media Lab, among others who advocate them as means for democratizing data-sharing. Organizations such as Open Credit Network in the UK are creating new paradigms for credit creation and economic revival; and coop exchange has also reported on the explosion of co-ops in South Korea and proposed co-ops as mechanisms for economic recovery from the pandemic through community-led buyouts of distressed assets. Zebras Unite is a coop movement that is gathering momentum since its launch in 2020 to catalyze the community, capital, and culture for people building businesses that are better for the world.
The idea for leveraging a co-op infrastructure toward accelerating COVID-19 recovery came from my realizing that:
How we recover from the pandemic is as important as the recovery…
Although 26+ vaccines are in different stages of Phase 3 clinical trials, it is far from clear:
- How can the patents, production technology, and manufacturing know-how for vaccines be accessed in compliance with appropriate legal frameworks especially in developing countries;
- How will vaccine efficacy rates and clinical hazards be rigorously detailed and how would data from side-effects and other anomalies be effectively funneled and analyzed during the vaccine roll-out?;
- How will the administration and supply of vaccines be equitably managed to ensure that vaccine distribution doesn’t exacerbate income and healthcare disparities?
- How can patients opt-in and seamlessly participate and even contribute to the drive to vaccinate hundreds of millions of citizens over the coming months?
I would like to propose an AI and blockchain powered intellectual property (“IP”), technology, know-how, and data cooperative as an effective approach to help drive rapid vaccine rollout and sustainable pricing. Although this may at first seem a a heretical notion, it’s a proposal that could set the stage for a more fundamental and democratic recovery of economic activity from the ravages of the pandemic.
Getting radical
A vaccine co-op would bring together the necessary intellectual property rights, manufacturing process, know-how, regulatory expertise, and data from the distribution of vaccines into a single platform that could be licensed as a package with associated training modules. It could also offer assistance in navigating vaccine registration with national regulatory authorities.
A licensing approach similar to that used by patent pools that are now active across numerous sectors (from video streaming technology to medicine) would be employed to address IP barriers. Patent pools have delivered large benefits to ensure that consumers of rapidly evolving and critically needed technology are not beholden any particular manufacturer. Similarly, patents and know-how that is critical to vaccine dissemination could be pooled together with manufacturer paying license fees to the patent and know-how holders. The IP, manufacturing process information, know-how, and regulatory expertise would be brought together through the organizations hosting the co-op infrastructure through tech transfer models utilized effectively by many university and other private licensing organizations. The co-op infrastructure would enable holders of IP and data rights to register their rights on a blockchain. These rights can be effectively validated through an independent and distributed group of experts and overseers who are charged with ensuring the authenticity and value of the relevant rights. A similar validation approach can also be used to ensure compliance by vaccine manufacturers and distributors of the terms — including fields of use and geographic limitations — required by the holders of the rights.
In addition, the organizations hosting the coop infrastructure would require that co-op members — which would include vaccine manufacturers and distributors — aggregate anonymized data and feedback from vaccine distribution across field centers. The collected data sets can train Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) models to dynamically reconfigure vaccine licensing, production, and distribution. Data rights can also be provided based on fee-based models to pharma companies and labs to enhance their R&D.
We can also tie in AI modules to ensure that vaccine distribution is responsively matched to the spread of the disease in particular regions and factors in demographics especially in developing nations and economically disadvantaged regions of industrialized countries. AI can provide powerful early alerts and countervailing strategies to respond to the spread of particular COVID-19 variants. By administering the monitoring and feedback of the response of new and existing vaccines to such variants through the co-ops economic incentives, the world’s public health systems would gain a much-needed shot in the arm to overtake the spread of corona virus variants that may proliferate as the base of the contagion has grown to 20M+ patients.
Alexa — find me a vaccine
Coming back now to the imaginative app with which I began this article, the preceding analyses and development should make it obvious that the co-op infrastructure can also be tied to empowering patients who have been and those seeking to be vaccinated. Such patients can offer rich data (anonymized through appropriate algorithmic means) to AI systems that match them to available vaccines. By mid-2021 in the US there are likely to be several vaccines that are available from different manufacturers. The vaccine co-op would ramp vaccine production and availability to grow at substantially higher rates as more producers can become co-op members and thereby sign-on for manufacturing vaccines originated from pharma companies in various countries (that have been appropriately authorized by the appropriate regulators). By joining the vaccine co-op as a patient, I would thus be able to get a tailored recommendation — and even schedule an appointment through my PDA — on a much faster cycle than might otherwise be the case! More importantly, my medical data related to the vaccine, allergies, response to the doses, and overall health conditions could be availed of by the co-op — all through meticulously crafted smart contracts that scrupulously enforce data privacy rights — for the benefit of successive generations of co-op stakeholders.
Assembling and accelerating such a co — op infrastructure also enables the capabilities of these systems to deliver urgent response and resilient supply chains across a range of scarce products and parts — from medical supplies to critically needed industrial parts — and the formation of complementary and adjacent co-ops all stimulated through reconstruction budgets allocated to pandemic reconstruction. To paraphrase what Dominic Barton said in McKinsey’s study of cooperatives published almost 10 years ago:
Business leaders today face a choice: to reform capitalism or let capitalism be reformed for them.
There has never been a more compelling time to confront that choice and build out the co-op infrastructure to deliver resilience and healing from this pandemic and other economic and public health disruptions that lie beyond our current horizon.
Raj Malhotra is founder and CEO of a Boston, USA, based enterprise that provides trusted co-op infrastructure for customers and collaborators in industries and applications ranging from healthcare to AI to Space Tech. He can be reached at raj@inventrust.com
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