Blockchain Enabled Transparent and Anti-Counterfeiting Supply of COVID-19 Vaccine Vials

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected almost all facets of peoples’ lives, various economic areas and regions of the world. In such a situation implementation of a vaccination can be viewed as essential but its success will be dependent on availability and transparency in the distribution process that will be shared among the stakeholders. Various distributed ledgers (DLTs) such as blockchain provide an open, public, immutable system that has numerous applications due the mentioned abilities. In this paper the authors have proposed a solution based on blockchain to increase the security and transparency in the tracing of COVID-19 vaccination vials. Smart contracts have been developed to monitor the supply, distribution of vaccination vials. The proposed solution will help to generate a tamper-proof and secure environment for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccination vials. Proof of delivery is used as a consensus mechanism for the proposed solution. A feedback feature is also implemented in order to track the vials lot in case of any side effect cause to the patient. The authors have implemented and tested the proposed solution using Ethereum test network, RinkeyBy, MetaMask, one clicks DApp. The proposed solution shows promising results in terms of throughput and scalability.

Blockchain for the Healthcare Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review

“…For this reason, an energy-consuming solution, such as a public blockchain, may not be the best choice when dealing with SCHMs. Our analysis shows that the scalability issue is not a prerogative of public blockchain alone, given that even studies investigating private, consortium, or hybrid blockchains did not explore scalability [31][32][33][34][35][36][37]39,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48]50,52,[54][55][56][57] and, in one case, failed to achieve it [30]. In the article published by Singh et al [38], scalability issues were solved thanks to the Raft consensus.…”

Vaccine supply chain coordination using blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies

“… Yong et al (2020) developed a “blockchain vaccine” system based on blockchain and machine learning technology to support vaccine traceability and smart contract functionality and address vaccine expiration and vaccine record fraud. Chauhan et al (2021) proposed a blockchain-based solution to improve the security and transparency of COVID-19 vaccine traceability and monitor vaccine supply and distribution through intelligent contracts. Shah et al (2021) provided a comprehensive review of blockchain technology application in the COVID-19 pandemic, presented a case study of a digital vaccine passport based on this technology, and analyzed its complexity.…”

Do Vaccination Attitudes Mediate the Link between Critical Consciousness and COVID-19 Vaccination Behaviour? A Cross-Sectional Study

“…After the virus spread to Europe and the United States, it gained enormous opportunities to increase prevalence and transmission. Since the development and global-level distribution of vaccines [2], there have been reports concerning vaccination intention [3,4] and vaccine hesitancy [4,5].…”