How Blockchain Records Could Help Us Achieve Herd Immunity?

Context: Blockchain technology could offer adequate technological capabilities in addressing the challenges in the health sector.

About Herd Immunity:

• In 1917, the US Bureau of Animal Industry was worried about a mysterious cattle infection killing unborn calves.
• It realized that a cow that had an abortion was highly likely to become immune to it, calves born and raised in such an affected herd had tolerance of the disease, and so the phrase ‘herd immunity’ took birth.

About Blockchain: It is a digital, secure and public record book of transactions, a universal ledger in cloud with strong cryptological protections that is distributed among various parties, and updated by consensus of majority of participants.

Challenges in vaccination to achieve Herd Immunity: While a combination of fundamental research in mRNA, the marvel of gene sequencing and the instant availability of data off the internet gave the world a new kind of vaccine within a year of the disease’s global outbreak, the world still strives for herd immunity, This is because of following constraints -

• Humongous demand: To vaccinate 8 billion people as rapidly as possible.
• Multiple obstacles: Production of enough doses, logistics-transportation, and affordability.
• Developing good protocols: On who needs to be immunised earlier and systems to track vaccinated.
• Privacy issues: Around health records and demographic identity.
• Social and religion-based resistances: Leading to vaccine hesitancy.
• Addressing the challenge of rapidly mutating virus: Vaccine development research to be furthered.
• Centralised command-and-control approach: As the virus behaves in a distributed and decentralised manner, our centralised command and control approach has been compromised. For e.g.
  • The much-hyped CoWin app in India often has glitches.
  • In the US, paper-based records are being used.

Way forward: To combine digitisation, decentralisation, data localisation and data privacy to build an agile and responsible health management ecosystem that is inclusive of institutions and citizens.

• Significance of blockchain technology:
  • High-security features: High-trust environment through transparency, security and immutability.
  • Scope of decentralisation: Can prevent misuse by central authority through distributed ownership and consensus mechanism for decision-making.
  • Applicability: Can improve tracking of vaccines and medicines and also provide people with a secure and private digital health record.
  • Futuristic: Developing counterfeit-resistant ‘vaccination passports’ in a more transparent, safe and open manner, without compromising personal data.