Melanie E. Moses
Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.”
A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout has turned out to be less than efficient, not only moving at a snail-like pace, but also vaccinating the privileged over the most at risk due to skewed prioritization algorithms and barriers to signing up for vaccines.
Using her expertise in scalable distribution systems in biology and designing algorithms for distributed robot systems, Moses proposes not using algorithms but instead looking at the vaccine distribution issue through the lens of algorithmic thinking. This involves laying out the following essential principles and goals to achieve a safe, fair and efficient vaccine rollout for 300 million Americans.
Algorithmic thinking requires stating goals with step-by-step instructions, actions, and timelines for achieving them while continuously testing against quantitative benchmarks to check for needed adaptations. Moses suggests the following goals to achieving the most effective vaccination strategy:
Goal #1: Slow the exponential growth of the virus. While waiting for the population to be vaccinated, we must engage in every social distancing tool we have to slow the viral spread and buy more time before new variants increase cases and mortality.
Goal #2: Vaccinate the populations most likely to die as fast as possible. Concentrate and prioritize vaccinating those groups that are most at risk including those over the age of 65 and minority populations who are at far greater risk at younger ages.
Goal #3: Reduce the total number of infections, even in young and healthy populations. An estimated 10% of cases result in a long term disability of some kind. Long term disability can be particularly devastating for younger populations, so it is also important to prevent infection in young people.
Goal #4: End the pandemic as fast as possible. Beyond the devastating physical effects the pandemic has had on the population, there are negative consequences to mental health and the economy.
The following three algorithmic principles demonstrate how these goals can be achieved:
Parallelization: Like algorithms, vaccination pipelines run fastest when they are run in parallel. Vaccinate multiple high priority groups at once.
Exponential growth in vaccinations: Linear solutions will never solve exponential problems. We must simultaneously slow the exponential growth of the virus and exponentially grow our vaccination rollout.
Match supply and demand: We need constant vigilance to accelerate whatever is slowing down vaccinations: initially this was vaccine supply, but vaccine supply is now projected to increase rapidly so we must focus on the pipelines that move vaccines from warehouses into arms. Very soon, reduced demand will be the most challenging barrier to vaccination.
Even if the distribution problem is solved and vaccines are able to roll out more rapidly, according to a poll done by Pew Research in December 2020, 20% of Americans are ‘pretty certain’ they won’t get vaccinated, even if more information comes out. In cities and states across the nation, the most at risk minority populations are the least vaccinated due to the combination of inaccessibility of vaccines and distrust of the medical system that continues to not serve them equitably. Moses emphasizes the importance of getting truthful information delivered by trusted messengers in the most at risk communities. She also calls for developing social media campaigns to generate exponential amplification of truthful information to combat online disinformation.
Melanie Moses recently joined CCC’s newly created task force on Responsible Computing. The task force works on a broad range of issues concerning privacy, ethics and overall responsible computing practices but plans to focus on a similar goal of combating online misinformation and disinformation.
