SUSTAINABLE PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN THE FUTURE: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault As A Model

Sumo Logic’s CTO, Christian Beedgen article "Getting Business Value out of Data, Through Continuous Intelligence" on why businesses need to closely examine their processes on how they obtain and analyze data and consider using a continuous intelligence approach to gain a competitive advantage is timely. The article can just as easily offer lessons on public/private sector collaboration in leveraging the lessons of the current pandemic and leveraging big data to align to key disruptions in supply chain shortages of emergency resources. In the

Deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, lies the Global Seed Vault. It is a long-term seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time — and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters. The Seed Vault represents the world’s largest collection of crop diversity.

Permafrost and thick rock ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen even without power. The Vault is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, offering options for future generations to overcome the challenges of climate change and population growth. It will secure, for centuries, millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today. It is the final back up.

Presidents Clinton and George W Bush advanced the strategic initiative to develop a centralized, intra-agency model to establish a Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.

The George W. Bush administration published the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza plan in 2005, which called on the federal government to distribute medical supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile governed by the Health and Human Services Department in the event of an outbreak.

In theory, state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency. Organized for a scalable response to a variety of public health threats, this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.

Following the Bush administration, successive failures by both the Obama and Trump administration in maintaining key inventories of pharma, medical devices, and protective gear have been painfully demonstrated in the present Corona Virus pandemic. The Obama administration instituted a policy of revising expiration dates for key materials and pharma inventories that directly impacted maintaining inventory levels to meet emergency planning goals set forth for the nation's 350 million citizens.

Regrettably, the pandemic has been politically weaponized, and often with disinformation. Recently, Joe Biden attacked Trump over N95 masks but they were depleted under the Obama administration and never restocked. When the Obama administration was advised to replenish the stockpile that had been used during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. But it never happened, they never did it, according to the Washington Examiner:

In 2009, the H1N1 outbreak hit the United States, leading to 274,304 hospitalizations, 12,469 deaths, and a depletion of N95 respirator masks.

A federally backed task force and a safety equipment organization both recommended to the Obama administration that the stockpile be replenished with the 100 million masks used after the H1N1 outbreak. Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, said that advice was never heeded.

“Our association is unaware of any major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown,” he said.

According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, there are only 12 million there now, when some estimates are that we might need 3.5 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Bloomberg News reported similar findings last week, noting, “After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog [of] orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

But what Biden left out is that Trump has already been on the case of the ventilators and the masks.

To its credit, the Trump administration has since employed the Defense Production Act to ask businesses to help make the protective equipment that will be needed to deal with anything that might be needed, as my colleague Sister Toldjah has reported. As she notes, Elon Musk donated thousands of masks this weekend. Trump has also asked the Defense Department to provide their supply to the cause to help out where needed, with 5 million N95 masks and 2000 ventilators in the meantime.

Lessons learned, Pandemic Planning for the Future

We should, as a global community likewise develop a global system of creating mass inventories for our 8 billion humans to ensure we will never again face shortages of ventilators, masks, HAZMAT along with key drugs and centralized with global agreements and best practices that ensure for prompt and systemic distribution in the event of a supply chain disruption and to ensure heat zones are targeted without delay.

This crisis is nothing compared to what a bio-terror or other pandemics could inflict. We will hopefully learn to use technology and coordinate a systemic response from the lessons we derive from this virus. We have models where global inventories have proven sustainable.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault offers an ambitious model not just for a reinvigorated national model to ensure inventories are replenished and regularly maintained at crisis levels, but rather, a global model should be evaluated with a world-wide agreement of creating a satellite of coordinated inventory banks that can be promptly distributed and databanks to ensure inventories are regularly updated and expiration dates are monitored to avoid waste and efficacy of dosages for key antibiotics, vaccines and other key assortments of medications that can be coordinated as treatment cocktails.

At the heart, the Svalbard public-private initiative is the permanent, self-sustaining Crop Diversity Endowment Fund. Each year, a portion of the fund’s value is paid out to ensure that the crop diversity held in genebanks is conserved and maintained. The fund allows the Crop Trust to fulfill its purpose: to create a permanent legacy of support for the key international collections of critical importance to the logistical and inventory aspects of key pandemic related supply chain. In the case of the Svalbard example, approximately 95% of the endowment’s value has been provided by national governments. The remainder has been provided by the private sector.

The current crisis has seen a broad consensus and collaboration with private sector leaders assist in the manufacturing and distribution of key supply chains to meet an overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure. In the most ambitious private sector collaboration, Elon Musk volunteered both SpaceX and Tesla to work on ventilators to meet the broad shortage crisis affecting the nation's hospitals.. And other companies are doing so as well. On Sunday, for example, President Donald Trump gave Ford and General Motors, along with Tesla, an official manufacturing green light.

In other tweets, Musk has said that his companies' manufacturing efforts may not bear fruit in time to alleviate the coming shortages. But on Sunday (March 22), the billionaire entrepreneur said that he nonetheless planned to start delivering lots of breathing machines very soon. Musk has said that his companies' manufacturing efforts may not bear fruit in time to alleviate the coming shortages. But on Sunday (March 22), the billionaire entrepreneur said that he nonetheless planned to start delivering lots of breathing machines very soon.

"We expect to have over ~1,200 [ventilators] to distribute this week. Getting them delivered, installed & operating is the harder part," "We expect to have over ~1,200 [ventilators] to distribute this week. Getting them delivered, installed & operating is the harder part"

The last sentence is the key concern for the purposes of this article. We need to absorb the lessons of the current crisis to minimize the bottlenecks of distribution and maximizing the private sector's philanthropic and supply chain strengths to work seamlessly with the nation's healthcare infrastructure in a manner in which data points are gathered, reviewed and resolved be it through artificial intelligence and supercomputer advancements to continually update a concerted plan for action.

It would be universally advantageous if a private-public hybrid endowment; with matching funds as a structure, to offer impetus towards similar insurance of coordinated response, supply chain infrastructure, and logical support and planning. Likewise, IBM Watson and other supercomputer and big data platform products could be in the offering to coordinate a global pandemic response in a seamless and beneficial manner to protect against future health crises of this nature.

Be it centralized or a broader distribution system established and maintained by multi-national agreements; or a hybrid model, we must consider that the key lesson in the current pandemic is a failure of imagination and a failure of supply chain and cooperation for seamless, and in-time, distribution of critical resources. We need to gather the lessons and consider what works for an agricultural crisis in terms of maintaining a crop diversity legacy must also be reflected in planning for the next, inevitable pandemic crisis.

In today's world "over there" is no longer a responsible perspective, as we have experienced that 'over there' in the global sense of hot zones in the pandemic crisis will inevitably be 'over here' and, objectively to late to contain without painful economic, social and healthcare implications. In today's world of Big Data and globalization, we witnessed a fundamental failure throughout national governments and industries to respond with all the machinations of technology at its disposal. In effect, we witnessed data points in abundance without fulfilling its end-case ideal of 'knowledge' derived to serve a more proactive and impactful result in the chain of events that have led to the most widespread disruption to humanity's collective healthcare, economic, social infrastructures. It cannot be allowed to have such a fundamentally avoidable disconnect of existing public, private channels to act without a cohesive technological array of resources from which to act on data. Be it ventilators, hazmat suits, N95 masks, or test kits the data points were in abundance for an assortment of relevant fields of expertise to act but the coordination and supply were woefully ill-prepared to act and leverage the collective knowledge of what the spread of this virus was communicating.

We can forgive the miscalculations of national governments on an occasion where few if ay comparable events in history have offered a road map worthy of the moment. That understood this is a pivot point where digital, genetic, machine learning, artificial intelligence and various big data platforms from which to extrapolate knowledge to serve the common good can be directed with the logistical and supply chain demands upon which humanity; and its existential future, depend.

Learn, Plan, & Adopt Globally.

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