Lessons from the Pandemic: How to deliver Infrastructure's Carbon Net-Zero future
COVID-19 Vaccines were delivered 10x faster than the historical average, what lessons can infrastructure take from their success?
March 2020; Borders held open in peace for generations close, social life of a week past now a criminal offence, human suffering unknown at such scale since the second world war the norm of the nightly news. Yet barely nine months later the sword of Damocles is turned by a shield so effective that we sit in spring 2022 in a world changed by its experience yet largely returned to a pre-pandemic norm.
The story of the COVID-19 vaccine development will be retold in untold history books, but all the scientists in the world would have been for nought without the change in approach by their regulatory institutions. In the face of an unprecedented pandemic, the old rule books, cultures and relationships were thrown aside, to be replaced by a new approach fueled by data, collaboration and continuous assessment.
Whilst the pandemic is hopefully behind us, both Russia’s war in Ukraine and the curling wave of climate change require equally fundamental changes in our regulatory institutions to deliver the infrastructure society needs to respond and adapt. Quintupling the worlds wind power capacity by 2030, or migrating Europe’s energy supply to geo-political alternatives by 2024 will only be delivered by tearing up old ways of working
Business as usual no more
To understand how remarkable the regulatory journey of the COVID-19 vaccines was, you must understand the pharmaceutical industries business as usual.
In the period 2013–2015, the median time for regulatory sign-off of a new drug was over 9 years! Proving that a prospective new drug achieves its intended outcome and is sufficiently safe for society's use is incredibly hard, understandably so.
So it is remarkable that when faced with the single largest medical crisis the world has seen since the Spanish flu of 1917, the pharmaceutical industry and its regulators were able to tear up the old rule book to deliver an effective and safe new drug in just 9 months, 90% faster than the industries median time for regulatory sign-off.
The scale and pace of the regulatory process didn’t just break records, it was unprecedented. Lessons learnt will influence the development of drugs for decades to come and set new expectations of the industry’s ability to respond to medical crises.
Whilst new technology played its part, notably MRNA; the most significant changes to achieve this record regulatory result were in the processes and culture of the pharmaceutical industry and its regulators.
These lessons have implications far beyond the confines of the medical world, lessons that the infrastructure sector and its regulators must learn from if they hope to deliver on the promise of solving society's greatest challenges of the 21st century on time and budget.
Lessons from the Pandemic
So what can the infrastructure sector learn from this journey?
The interaction between proposers and regulators is at the heart of every infrastructure project. The balancing of the various stakeholders' requirements, the environmental impact and the cost to deliver, almost always exceeds the length of the project’s build phase. The first official consideration of what became the recently opened London Crossrail was in 1944, New York’s 2007 Second Avenue subway extension was first discussed in 1919!
The dual crises of climate change and the new geopolitical reality require a step change in how the infrastructure sector and its regulators collaborate to deliver the strategic infrastructure society needs in the 21st century. We need a different culture, ways of working and technology that aligns incentives to deliver on time and budget.
Over the coming weeks we will explore three core learnings from the pharmaceutical industry's approach to the Covid-19 pandemic; how these shifts in culture, ways of working and technology-enabled a dramatic improvement in the delivery of cutting-edge vaccines which have saved millions of lives.
- Multiple Paths, Multiple opportunities: How industry and its regulators kept their options open by developing multiple vaccine candidates simultaneously and cross-pollinated learning between candidates to quickly deliver the optimum solution.
- Remote first trials: How industry and its regulators ran the largest clinical trial of a new vaccine in history in the middle of a pandemic by leveraging remote teams and technology.
- Iterative Data, Iterative Learning: How industry and its regulators collaborated in reviewing new data as it became available providing rapid feedback to clinical teams and government stakeholders.
Lastly we will attempt to synthesize these learnings into preliminary policy recommendations for infrastructure regulators grappling with responding to the dual crises of climate change and geopolitical uncertainty.
About Continuum Industries
Continuum Industries is a provider of an AI-powered infrastructure development platform, Optioneer, that enables power, utility and renewables companies to instantly visualise, analyse and comprehensively assess routing options for power lines, cables and pipelines.
By incorporating all environmental constraints into the development process from the very beginning and considering them together with social, engineering and cost criteria, Optioneer bridges the gap between existing routing procedures and the pace at which project development needs to happen to meet Net Zero targets.
