How can weslow the spread of the coronavirus while maintaining our privacy? Will atest-and-trace app have to track our every move? Shane Bigelow, CEO of Ownumand Vital Chain, joined me on the latest episode of Explain to Shane to discusshow blockchain can help in the battle against COVID-19.

Below is an edited and abridged transcript of our talk. You can listen to the podcast here and read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to the Explain to Shane podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

ShaneTews: Can you walk us through the work? I know you guys put this togetherpretty quickly, but you have a very interesting consortium youre working withthat is specifically Ohio-based, but it probably goes beyond that, so you wantto give us the basics?

ShaneBigelow: Vital Chain is a company that we started underneath our holdingcompany, Ownum. Ownum creates different companies that digitize different vitalrecords. And Vital Chain started, as an idea in our head a couple of years ago,but the basic concept was to digitize birth and death certificates. And whenyou contemplate a birth or death certificate, all it is is a record that amedical professional signed off on that talks about a particular eventoccurring, the event being a birth or a death.

Well you cantransfer that same base technology that weve spent a few years developing anduse it to track any medical event, including receiving an inoculation,vaccination, or antibody test. And that to us is a way that we can provide aservice back to the country to allow for people to have a validation tool ora certification tool is probably a better word a certification tool for thetests that youve received. So on the presumption that mass testing is rollingout, which I think we all have to presume will occur in some way and not aproblem that we necessarily need to solve for on the presumption that masstesting is rolling out, there needs to be a way to certify the results and thatwould make it usable inside of the enterprise world. Because without it, Idont know what people would do. Would they just walk with their test resultsin a manila folder or something like that?

They need away to just have these results certified and to have the results that if youthink about it, theyre only going to last for a certain period of time. Theyneed to be able to time out as well, and pieces of paper cant do that.

Youvealso alluded to having an audit trail, which seems to be part of the goingforward equation where we need to be able to understand how we validate andthen what is the trust mechanism on this. So it seems like you have some reallygood partners that are engaged there and this is a model that can be emulated.So what is your plan? How are you guys going to roll this out?

If you thinkabout it, everyone gets the test and then you get a particular result from thetest. The result could have a variety of options to it. So lets be clear,theres people whove never had the test. So thats one category of people.Theres people that take the test and it turns out that they have the virus. Soclearly theyve got to quarantine and take care of themselves and get the rightmedical care. Theres people that take the test and do not have the virus, butalso dont have the antibodies present. Then theres people that take the test,dont have the virus, and do have the antibodies present. But the antibodiescould range in terms of how significant they are in one person versus anotherbased on a number of factors that the medical community is still quite franklysorting out.

The resultsfrom the test will have to be deployed in different ways. So at first whatwell know for sure, and theres really good science around it, is who has thevirus and who doesnt. Thats the first standard. But clearly if you dont havethe virus at the point you take the test, you could go somewhere an hour, twohours, five minutes later and acquire the virus. So how do you test for that?What use cases can use that data out of the gate? And there are some placesthat could use that data out of the gate. So knowing that the people youreadmitting to your place dont have the virus, if youve properly cleaned yourplace and youre not worried about the virus being carried in, there is utilityto that to start getting the economy going.

As theserological tests advance, and we wind up with a better test to reveal what theantibodies are and agreement in the scientific community, medical communitiesaround what those antibody levels mean, thats when well be able to roll outto the next phase of understanding what everyones antibody levels are and whatthat would permit them to do. So our certification tool will mature as thatscience matures. There are a variety of serological tests that are starting tocome out. I dont think theres uniform agreement in the medical communityaround the veracity of what those tests would imply for your ability to returnto work, or to a plane, or to a sporting facility. That will come, but it willcome in short order. This is all going to evolve very, very rapidly as the masstesting rolls out.

One ofthe examples you shared with me earlier, you and I are both huge fans of Clearbecause it just seems to solve a lot problems. Of course it was solvingproblems different than this prior than a couple of months ago, but I have notused Clear in a stadium. I know that Clear has been rolling itself out instadiums and I imagine theres competitors to it, but explain how this willwork in that environment.

Yeah, so ifyou think about the way Clear works for anyone thats listening and notfamiliar with this, you scan your fingerprints, your irises, and you keep thatinformation inside of Clears database. And then when you go to check in toTSA, instead of having to have the TSA agent verify who you are by looking atyour license, Clear has done that by looking at your biometrics and you getpassed through security considerably faster as a function of that. It workssimilarly with sporting arenas where you can attach your ticket account toClear and instead of scanning your ticket, they scan your irises to get in. Iuse it to go to the Cleveland Indians games and it works fantastically well.Even renting a car, Hertz does it now too.

So whatwould happen is that within the Clear accounts, and to be fair, we haventspoken to Clear yet, but its clear, pun intended, how this would work. Wewould be embedded inside of the barcode that is part of your ticket, whichwould then be, obviously its linked to Clear. The way that were controllingfor privacy, because I think you have to think about privacy in this instance,its not as if the arena needs to have your medical record. That is not the waythis will work. The way it works is that they set a standard for what theyrecomfortable with in letting people back in. We are just certifying that yourtest meets that standard. Were not sharing medical data, were not moving yourdata around. The arena would set a standard that youd have to meet in orderfor them to feel comfortable letting you in and you either meet or dont meet.So it becomes binary that you are allowed in or youre not allowed in.

It wouldwork the same way, by the way, for a barbershop or for your local store. Theywill be able to control their profile and say, Heres what werecomfortable doing. This is America after all, the enterprise shouldcontrol who they want to have in to their business. And certainly this is atool that would enable them to control for the health of the people enteringduring this very different time.

So to useyour barber example. Are they scanning an app? Is that where theyre gettingthis information?

Yeah, soits a great example. So our solution for the barbers is not to imply that theyhave a scanner, right? I dont want small business to have to go out and incureven more expense during a period like this. Instead theyd set up an accountwithin Vital Chain. They could then print off a QR code that as people come totheir facility, theyd use the QR code scanner on their phone, scan that QRcode. It immediately loops into their Vital Chain app and their Vital Chain appsays youre approved or youre not approved to enter this facility. And so thateliminates the technical need for the barbershop to have to have a scanner. Itkeeps it very simple for the consumer. And most importantly, it keeps the data inthe consumers hands. Its the consumers data. Theres no reason why it shouldhave to be shared with every place you want to go enter.

Butcertainly places are going to set standards for how you can enter them and youneed to be able to prove or certify to them that youre able to go in. But youneed to control your own data. And thats the big difference between us andcontact tracing. With contact tracing, its anything but your own data. I thinkwhat people are fearful of with contact tracing is that all of a sudden, Appleand Google find out I was near someone with COVID, they send me an alert and 30seconds later Im also getting advertisements to buy a ventilator. I dont wantthat. I dont want them having that level of knowledge of my health.

I also dont like the concept of being marketed to during this time. I think the fear is there that they would do it. I havent seen assurance that they wont do it, but contact tracing is a very useful tool to figuring out how to eliminate hot spots. So thats my point about this has to work in tandem, right? So we can keep the data private and contact tracing if its done on an opt in basis can be useful to reduce hot spots. Its going to be a myriad of solutions that have to come together to really get rid of this virus and move us back into a state of normalcy.

Original post:

Using blockchain to beat COVID-19: Highlights from my conversation with Shane Bigelow - American Enterprise Institute