As we inch towards the end of an interminably long year, the light at the end of this dark tunnel is the availability of an effective vaccine. COVID19 has not only affected the health of people world over, but also that of economies. Almost every country, except New Zealand and maybe China, continues to reel under the impact of COVID19 and a fully-safe vaccine is awaited with bated breath.

Currently, the Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine has received regulatory approvals, with Britain’s nonagenarian Margaret Keenan becoming the first person in the world to receive the jab on December 8th 2020. Last week, the vaccine developed by USA’s Moderna Inc. and the National Institute of Health was deemed safe by several scientific studies. UK, Bahrain, Malaysia, Switzerland, Canada and Mexico are the first set of countries that have rolled off the initial administration of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, while the USA has added the Moderna Inc-NIH vaccine to its arsenal. Russia’s Gamaleya Institute declared its Sputnik V vaccine to be 91.4% effective, while China’s Sinopharm, Sinovac Biotech and CanSino Biologics have been given approval to begin mass vaccination.

This is arguably the biggest vaccination drive in modern history. Specifically, India after it approves vaccines could end up championing the largest COVID19 vaccination drive in the world singlehandedly. Could AI play a definitive role here in managing the challenges expected in executing this vaccine drive?

While the application of AI in healthcare is not new, COVID19 may have accelerated the pace of innovation in digital technologies for the sector – be it point-of-care health, remote monitoring of vitals or even teleconsultation. Now that we are very close to procuring an effective vaccine, healthcare providers, hospitals and governments have a mammoth task ahead of them – inoculating all citizens in a speedy yet orderly fashion. To date, the fastest mass vaccination drive has been that for mumps – and this took four years. COVID has wreaked havoc in business, disrupted the order of normal life and this is taking a toll on people worldover, so governments cannot afford to spend a lot of time on mass vaccination. The trend is that healthcare / frontline workers, senior citizens with comorbidities will get the first preference for the jab, followed by the rest of the population. Governments are already anticipating the various logistical challenges they may have to encounter while rolling off this elaborate vaccination plan. It will be critical to do demand forecasting and ensuring a steady supply of medicines are available. While mass vaccination is key, there could be a range of side effects of the vaccine. This could lead to citizens hesitating to take the virus, or worse, additional stress on already overworked hospitals should they develop adverse symptoms.

There’s no time to lose. AI proved its efficacy in assisting researchers and governance bodies in managing the pandemic to an extent. It may just come through in this endeavour to execute the world most extensive vaccine drive.

Global Efforts To Harness AI For Inoculation

With 68 million to vaccinate, the UK government plans to use AI to detect any safety concerns and side effects that the vaccine may produce. The UK’s key medical regulator Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has given a $1.96 million contract to Genpact’s UK arm to design a machine learning system that can ingest reports on side effects and pick up potential safety concerns. According to the Financial Times, MHRA stated that there could be 50,000 to 100,000 reports of side effects for every 100 million doses injected. Even the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this year toyed with the idea of deploying AI to detect the side effects of drugs it produces, and shortlisted a technology company Enigma as one with the easiest tech for integration. Although there is no clarity on whether FDA will use this technology to check the efficacy of the COVID19 vaccine, there is sufficient interest in this use case.

What India Is Doing

Usually when disease outbreaks happen, followed by the need for largescale inoculation, sero surveys are conducted to understand how the disease affects the different parts of the population. This information is especially useful to map out areas that need vaccinations as a priority. Sero surveys usually take months, but an Indian IT firm Thalamus Irwine has developed an AI and IoT-based platform called Garuda that can assist the government in identifying vulnerable parts of the population, and ensure the infection chain gets broken. CEO Rishabh Sharma in an interview with IANS said analysis allows them to visualize the impact of viruses geographically and demographically. Using AI, they can identify vulnerable populations, predict future trends and monitor the virus movement.

The Rajasthan-based NGO Khushi Baby, which is primarily into using NFC to track vaccine administration in community health centres has modified its offering this year to help the Rajasthan Department of Health respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. This platform used by 58,000 health workers (including ASHAs, ANMs, and medical officers) facilitates door-to-door screening, referral, and follow-up care for COVID-19 and other primary care concerns. In the last three months since launch, over 1.2 Cr beneficiaries across Rajasthan have been screened via this platform, which will be extended moving forward to longitudinally track community health, including the forthcoming delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to the population at large.

There are plenty of challenges that 2021 will bring forth, even as we prepare to say goodbye to 2020 with the hope that 2021 will be infinitely better. With a vaccine on the horizon, its not premature to get our hopes up. But we cannot win this battle alone.