VeChain Partners With Shanghai Authorities to Aid in Vaccine Authentication Via Blockchain

By Dmitriy

BTC Wires: The blockchain-based firm VeChain which evaluates quality and reliability of food and drugs by tracking supply chains, is now working in collaboration with the Shanghai Municipal Government to run a Drug and Vaccine Traceability Solution. This collaboration, announced at the beginning of this week, comes in the wake of a controversial vaccine scandal which revealed that faulty and wrongly documented vaccines had been administered to thousands of schoolchildren in China. In operation since 2016, this tracing solution is the only blockchain project to find support from the Shanghai authorities and has now been commissioned to roll out tested and okayed solutions by end of 2020.

In July, citizens found out that Changsheng Bio Technology Co. had been fined by the Chinese pharma authorities for having produced over 250000 subpar vaccines for infants. Its data fabrication in 2014 with regard to a rabies vaccine was also brought to light. The state-owned vaccine maker Wuhan Institute of Biological Products Co also came under fire for having supplied a large number of inferior quality vaccines.

The VeChain platform uses IoT (Internet of Things) technology reliant on RFID and near field communication for monitoring movement in supply chains. In addition, it utilizes its proprietary VeChain Thor blockchain to capture production and transportation information. It is equipped to track temperature levels during production, transportation and storage stages and can monitor it throughout cold chain distribution as well as use in hospitals. With unique codes attached to every Vaccine, all relevant information can be easily accessed.

VeChain’s platforms combines IoT technology – that uses RFID and “near field communication” (or NFC) tags to track supply chain movements – with its own proprietary VeChainThor Blockchain that captures and records production and transportation data. The system can even monitor temperature levels for vaccines, from manufacture through storage, cold chain distribution and hospital usage. Each vaccine is labelled with a unique identifying code that covers the complete history of the product.

VeChain has had an exciting week so far with this news as well as the news that it has been selected to be a part of the NTT DOCOMO 5G Partner Program. With these two developments, VeChain is well-positioned to transform both the vaccine authentication as well as the telecommunication services of China.