Covid-19 vaccine… pharmaceutical industry is disrupting themselves!

Fantastic work! We have a new vaccine that can make us immune to Covid-19, which is part of a broad family of coronaviruses.

Discussions are now breaking out in many countries as to who should get that vaccine first. Elderly people, vulnerable people with chronic diseases, people who come into close professional contact with many other people, at less than one and a half meters, on a daily basis. And many more groups. Certainly not an easy job for decision-making bodies. Also the question, what do we do with the group that does not want to be vaccinated for religious, fundamental or suspicious reasons. Suspicion, for example, because one cannot believe that a vaccine, that normally requires years of research and testing, is now available in about 8 months. That cannot be good is the sentiment. Even on a political level this is in debate.

May I welcome you to the 21st century, the age of exponential technologies...

People, including politicians, who hadn't noticed that the world has changed a bit since the Middle Ages, couldn't have failed to notice that there is such a thing as information technology. This reaches a bit further than the mainstream use of Facebook, Googling, Instagram, WhatsApp, some Office tools or emailing.

Today we have techniques like DNA sequencing, CRISPR (gene editing) and Artificial Intelligence (and about 15 more, but I'm leaving them out because that doesn't fit the purpose of this essay). We are producing and using data, a lot of data. In order to be able to process that data, massive amounts of computational power is required. The tremendously rapid development in the field of computer technology, particularly chip technology, enables us to process the vast growing amount of data involved in the development of vaccines, including trials. The optimal use of data, historical and current data, offers us an entirely different dynamic to the development of vaccines (but also of medications).

However, today’s 'old' image of laborious processes in laboratories, where people roam around in blue jackets with pipettes, is now mainly a digital process of data collection from and processing of each step of the development. Validation of hypotheses is therefore much faster. These techniques are being applied on a large scale in laboratories all over the world.

Under international pressure and fear of further deterioration of economies, the Covid-19 pandemic has given this development process an enormous boost. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to do this for some time now, but there was no global pressure to really speed developments up (and therefore to do trials way more cheaply). The focus was more on securing IPs and protecting those to stretch the horizon of development and use that as a justification for high prices of drugs. That chain seems to be broken by the industry itself! This will put the discussion about the development of new medicines in a completely different light. Looking forward to that!

Since we are dealing with exponential technologies (the process speed doubles roughly every eighteen months), it is not difficult to imagine that new vaccines and medications can be developed much faster, and THUS cheaper. Because of the use of exponential technologies, many new entrants are jumping in this arena. The required technologies are abundantly available.

There are so many interests at stake, that we are able now to follow the development of this vaccine fairly transparently. We are directly witnessing the power of these technologies all over the world. And then to think that we are only scratching the surface of exponential technologies, like wandering around in the stone age.

What this also makes clear to us, and not yet widely recognized, is the deflationary nature of digital technologies such as those mentioned above. The marginal cost of developments will be reduced dramatically. This cries out for new business models to which many companies and economists have no answer yet because they are still trapped in the old 20th century thinking and business models. Turmoil glooms around the corner!

We have so much trouble seeing and understanding the speed of so many processes around us, powered by the 'digital engine', that we easily ask questions that a vaccine can 'never' be developed so quickly. The same thing that very few people probably know (let alone understand) that the microprocessor in the new iPhone12 does a whopping 3.4 trillion calculations per second right now. That's more than a million times the power of all the computers needed to get the first humans on the moon. That kind of speed helps us to do amazing things such as developing a vaccine at rocket speed.

The time has come to govern with a future oriented mindset and not to relapse into 'old thinking', because the past doesn't fit anymore where we are now (and dragging the 'now' to find a fit with where we are going, doesn't work either). Instead of wasting time with the pointless discussion that this vaccine has been developed (too) quickly (and put into perspective with the above explanation), we should start immediately with focusing on creating an infrastructure that enables countries to monitor the millions of people (worldwide) who will receive this vaccine (because nowadays this can be done very easily with other exponential technologies such as wearables). Now imagine how quickly we can develop a modification of an existing vaccine if needed...  In a few months?