Salesforce futurist Peter Schwartz (with team members Nick Costigan, Noah Flower, Angela Gleason) outlines three possible COVID-19 vaccine scenarios driven by three core uncertainties: (1) the vaccine science itself — timing, effectiveness, dosing, storage, and duration of immunity; (2) public willingness to accept the vaccine; and (3) who develops and controls access and on what terms. He defines three scenarios: "Zero Hurdles" (vaccine arrives soon, trusted, and equitably distributed), "Sprint and Stumble" (vaccine arrives quickly but with trust, safety, or access problems and is distributed unevenly), and "Long March" (vaccine development takes years, trust grows over time, but access may be politically controlled). The video frames these as axes that shape broader macro outcomes.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Peter Schwartz, Salesforce's futurist. I'm the SVP of Strategic planning. And our team, Nick Costigan, Noah Flower and Angela Gleason, have been working on scenarios since the beginning of the pandemic. We've looked at the dynamics of how the economic, social, health and political crises have been unfolding. But one of the questions at the center of it is the likelihood of a vaccine and its timing and its effect. So we took a deeper dive, looking at the uncertainties around the vaccine. So we wanted to prepare a short video on the scenarios for the vaccine itself. So what we see are three fundamental uncertainties. The first is the vaccine itself and its timing and availability. There's enormous amount of research going on, many programs running in parallel. This morning, in fact, I was speaking with Sir Jeremy Farrer, the head of the welcome Trust, and he was saying there's as many as 55 different running in parallel. So there's a lot of effort going on, but we don't know when it will become available. We don't know how effective it will be. We don't know whether it will require multiple shots. Will it require cold to keep it available? So there's still quite a bit of uncertainty about the timing, nature and availability of the vaccine itself. Will it confer immunity for a long time? Only briefly. So there's a lot of uncertainty about the availability and nature of the vaccine itself. The second uncertainty has to do with whether people will take the vaccine. Even before the pandemic, there were concerns about vaccines, not for most people, but there was an anti vax movement. Now, however, we're bringing a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic very rapidly to the market. And a big question on many people's mind is, will they take it? Ask yourself, if you had children, would you give it to your child? So there's a lot of uncertainty about, even if there is a vaccine, how quickly people will take up that vaccine. And then the third uncertainty has to do with who develops a vaccine and under what terms do they make it available. Is it developed by governments like China or Russia? Is it developed by private industry around the world? How much will it cost? Who will get it? Who will determine who will get it? Will it be made available mostly to, say, initially, the frontline workers who need to be taken care of, and so on. So there's a lot of uncertainty about the terms of access. So those are the three big uncertainties, the basic science itself. What will happen? Secondly, the question of will people take the vaccine and Third, who will get access on what terms? So those are our three axes of uncertainty. So if you think about it, the vaccine access is later or sooner, whether in fact it's fair players or game players making it available, and whether people will take it on board, it's easier or harder to get people to take the vaccines. So with that in mind, we came up with three scenarios. The first scenario is what we call zero hurdles. And in this, the vaccine becomes available fairly soon, say toward the end of this year, beginning of next year. And that there's a high degree of reliability. The FDA stands behind it, regulators stand behind it. So people come to trust it, and it is made available on a kind of fair basis. Everybody gets equal access. Probably that means it goes to the frontline workers first, healthcare workers, et cetera, who are especially vulnerable next, the most vulnerable population. So, like me, and then ever more broadly available. So this is the best case scenario where the science works quickly, where people trust it, and where it made available on a equitable basis. So that's the first scenario. The second scenario is called Sprint and stumble. Yes, it does become available, but, you know, maybe people don't trust it quite as much. The vaccine is produced quickly and there's serious question about it, and so maybe even some side effects begin to occur and maybe the institutions that produce it are not as trustworthy. Say it comes out of some countries or some companies that people don't have quite as much trust in, and that, for example, as a result, it is made available only on the terms of the people who've made it available, say other countries who provide it to their friends and not everyone. So this is the second scenario, what we call Sprint and Stumble. And then the third scenario is the long March. This is where the science is really hard, where it takes a long time to develop a vaccine. Years, perhaps two, three, even four years. Finally, of course, by that time people will come to trust it because a lot of work will have gone behind it, much testing will have gone behind it, but it could still be in the hands of those who determine its access on a political basis, on a narrower basis. So even in that scenario, the if you've invested a lot, you may wish to control who gets access to that vaccine in a timely way. So there's still a great deal of uncertainty, uncertainty about the science, uncertainty about the desirability of taking the vaccine and desirability and the plan for making it available by the producers of that vaccine. So these are the three scenarios. Zero hurdles, sprint and stumble, Long march. And they will have a big impact on the macro scenarios. Thank you very much.
