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Improving Vaccine Safety Using Blockchain

Published:02 June 2021Publication History
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Abstract

In recent years, vaccine incidents occurred around the world, which endangers people’s lives. In the technical respect, these incidents are partially due to the fact that existing vaccine management systems are distributively managed by different entities in the vaccine supply chain. This architecture makes it relatively easy to modify or even delete the vaccine circulation data maliciously, which makes tracing problematic vaccine hard and identifying the responsibility for a vaccine accident hard. To solve these issues, this article presents a blockchain-based solution to protect the whole process of vaccine circulation. We first propose a model to supervise the vaccine circulation process by incorporating existing regulatory practices. Then, we propose a blockchain-based tracing system to implement this model. The proposed system takes the blockchain as a global, unique, and verifiable database to store all the circulation data. Through data insertions and queries on the global and unique database, the proposed system achieves the protection of vaccine circulation. We also implement a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed system. Experimental results confirm that the proposed system is beneficial.

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
          ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 21, Issue 2
          June 2021
          599 pages
          ISSN:1533-5399
          EISSN:1557-6051
          DOI:10.1145/3453144
          • Editor:
          • Ling Liu
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 2 June 2021
          • Online AM: 7 May 2020
          • Accepted: 1 March 2020
          • Revised: 1 February 2020
          • Received: 1 November 2019
          Published in toit Volume 21, Issue 2

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