SUPPLY CHAIN

1 . Botco . ai has developed a chatbot that uses AI and natural language processing to answer people ' s queries about the COVID-19 vaccine .

2 . Closedloop . ai created an open source index that uses AI to predict which people are likely to develop severe complications from the virus

3 . Aidoc is providing AI technology to radiology services across the UK , to help radiologists quickly detect issues and reduce the backlog of cases that has built up during the pandemic

Distrust in clinical trials When the first COVID-19 vaccine trials began , recruiters advertised online , aiming to recruit 30,000 people a month . However the vast majority of those who signed up were white healthcare workers . " If you put yourself in their shoes , at the start of the pandemic they had been hit unbelievably hard " Embrey says . " There were PPE shortages all over the world . It made sense that those people were the most interested in getting protected the fastest , but it resulted in a huge lack of diversity in the clinical trials ."

Distrust in clinical trials goes back a long way . Native Americans experienced abuse and exploitation in the name of medical research , and in the days of the slave trade Black people were experimented on against their will , their bodies stolen for dissection . " History has built up distrust in many minority communities about wanting to participate in clinical trials " Embrey says . " So what we often see is that participants are 90 to 95 % white . For a long time I think people thought that was the best that we could do , and there wasn ' t a lot of action towards making those clinical trials more diverse . COVID helped underline what we ' ve known was a problem , but gave us an onus to really fix it ."

Given the global spread of the virus , it was clear that the more diverse the clinical trial , the better understanding scientists would have of potential adverse events . " With an equal and diverse representative population , we ' d be able to say with confidence that this is a very effective vaccine , that we understand our results . We ' d know we aren ' t people putting people at risk long term and the efficacy of the vaccine holds across the entire population ." healthcareglobal . com 121