FAIR: A Blockchain-based Vaccine Distribution Scheme for Pandemics

Abstract

Demand forecasting, supply acquisition in healthcare supply chains are significant concerns spanning various organizations and bodies, rendering a crucial backbone to medical services necessary for everyday living. A global pandemic resulting in critical demand for medications and vaccines was an eye-opener in the current era. The intrinsic complexity among the bodies involved in the supply chain results in a lack of data transparency, security, privacy, and reliable communication. The counterfeited drug is an outcome of such limitations that adversely affects a global population. Consecutively, fair allocation and distribution of drugs and vaccines to administer them to a global mass equally is also a significant concern. Blockchain as technology grants an essential platform to track and manage transactions among communicating parties in the supply chain using a peer-to-peer, secured, distributed ledger, removing the need for intermediaries or entrusted third parties. Most existing studies focus on tracking and tracing supply chain systems in a centralized manner, leading to transparency, authenticity, data privacy, and authenticity concerns in healthcare supply chains. In this article, we propose a FAIR blockchain-based approach deploying smart contracts leading to transparent traceability of data and transactions in the healthcare supply chain between the communicating parties We propose an approach that allows fair allocation and distribution of vaccines as per the demand generated from the global population. We present a system architecture and algorithm representing the communication between parties that governs our proposed approach. We have computed network performance based and blockchain based evaluation of the proposed system. We have calculated the communication and computation cost of 1152 bits and 12.6 ms respectively.