The Rising Cost of Covid
As of this week, global unemployment is rapidly escalating to levels not seen since the 1930s, the world’s governments have already allocated trillions of dollars to covid relief efforts, and every day that the crisis continues means more lost jobs, and livelihoods, and lives.
The cost of covid, in other words, is enormous and rising.
One of the key elements of the solution is a vaccine, and the World Health Organization reports that 70 different teams of researchers are working on Covid-19 vaccines, three of which have advanced to clinical evaluation as of April 11, and the 67 were in preclinical evaluation phase.
The full list can be accessed here as a downloadable pdf.
(The WHO page has not been updated since April 11, although it’s likely that additional labs have since joined the effort.)
These projects include efforts by private companies, universities, and government labs around the world, and will require tens of millions of dollars of investment.
We have to wonder though if there’s any duplication of effort here. And it’s obvious that there must be, because the competitive dynamics of the health care marketplace creates powerful incentives for individual companies and institutions to tackle challenges like these on their own. There are huge profits waiting for the winners in the race for the successful vaccine that will immediately result in the sale of 7 billion doses.
But then we also have to ask, “Does this sort of competition speed up or slow down the progress?” and it’s apparent that if there was more collaboration there would be less duplication of effort, and therefore faster progress. Possibly or probably much faster.
In some situations that’s perhaps an acceptable attribute of a capitalist system, but in the case of covid it’s probably not. As of today (May 16, 2020), about 310, 000 people have died, 4.6 million have contracted coronavirus, and the current death rate in the US is 1000 – 2000 per day. The search for and delivery of a virus will not only impact the lives and deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of people, but it could also mean the difference between a global economic depression, and a return to normal economic life.
How, then, could we set up a system for researchers to collaborate on developing a solution while still protecting their intellectual property rights and commercial prospects?
On the Shoulders of Giants…
A new paper published yesterday (May 15, 2020) in Science magazine outlines an innovative approach that could enable scientists around the world to work together and share knowledge by using a blockchain-enabled knowledge repositories that would automatically validate and time-stamp proofs of their existence, integrity, and (scientific) priority.
Here we see a blockchain application not taking the form of a speculative cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, but as a powerful tool to facilitate and help manage complex knowledge discovery and accelerate knowledge sharing, which indeed is the basis of most scientific advances.
It was Newton who remarked that if he had seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants, so imagine how much more progress we could make if today’s global scientific community didn’t have to wait months or years for their scientific advances to be patented and then published, but instead could be shared safely and instantly through a what the authors call an “outbreak R&D blockchain infrastructure (ORBI).”
The paper was written by leading virologists in the Netherlands, Mark B. van der Waal, Carolina dos S. Ribeiro, George B. Haringhuizen, Eric Claassen, and Linda H. M. van de Burgwal together with visionary technologist Moses Ma of our sister company FutureLab an advanced technology incubator.
You can access the paper and the supplementary materials here.
Two days after publication, the paper is garnering significant attention. It already ranks among the top 5% of all research outputs scored by the Altmetric tracking system, and it’s climbing fast. The coauthors are actively working to develop the proposed ORBI consortium, and you are invited to contact us if this is of interest for you or your organization.
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Images by: Fernando Zhiminaicela, Pixabay (test vial); Yaroslav Danylchenko, Pixabay (masked Mona Lisa), Florent Courtaigne (covid microscope & riding the dollar)