Why Verolyx Exists

Most warnings about a shortage arrive after the shortage is already visible on a shelf, in a hospital, or on a factory floor. By then the decision that mattered already got made somewhere upstream, months earlier, by people who had no idea they were making it.

Verolyx exists to move that warning earlier.

I spent close to a decade inside WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, and during COVID I founded and led the Pandemic Supply Chain Network, tracking exactly this kind of failure in real time: a raw material squeezed on one continent quietly becoming a hospital shortage on another, months before anyone connected the two.

That experience became a public argument. Over the past year I have been writing a series called "AI and the Humanitarian Gap," making the case that the tools now available to see these connections coming, cross-sector, cross-border, cross-industry, are not being used anywhere close to their potential in global health security.

Verolyx is the concrete next step in that argument, not just another restatement of it.

It is a bimonthly disruption intelligence report built on a simple premise: the same raw material, workforce, or logistics chokepoint often sits underneath two, three, or four industries that never talk to each other. A veterinary disease outbreak can quietly squeeze a pharmaceutical supply chain. A shortage in one country's pig herd can tighten a hospital's blood-thinner supply on the other side of the world, and the food industry at the same time, through a connection almost nobody is watching for.

Each edition tracks one material or product through a consistent method: what is triggering the disruption, where the vulnerability actually sits in the value chain, who else is exposed to it without knowing, and how severe and imminent the risk looks against the historical record. Edition 1 covers heparin, a critical anticoagulant whose entire global supply runs through a single species, in a single country, exposed to the same fragility that caused a deadly contamination crisis in 2008 and has not gone away since.

Verolyx is an independent publication for now. It is also intended as the founding proof of concept for a future member-governed institution built on the same principle: that shared, neutral intelligence about these risks makes everyone safer, and no single company or government should have to build it alone.

If that is a problem you think about too, subscribe. New editions publish bimonthly.

— Michael Griffin