It wasn’t Sunday but the topic was “bloody” as U2 frontman Bono, together with Philippine Red Cross chairman and chief executive Richard Gordon and Zipline chief executive Keller Rinaudo, on Dec. 10 announced the launch of a delivery service of blood via drones in the Philippines.
The Irish rock and roll icon and philanthropist (also known as Paul David Hewson) was in the country last week together with his bandmates David Evans (The Edge), Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr. as part of their The Joshua Tree Tour 2019 concert—their first time in the Philippines.
But before hitting the stage at the Philippine Arena, Bono joined the official signing between PRC and Zipline, where he is a board member.
“Music is my passion, but Zipline is where all my other passions come together,” he said.
Launched in October 2016, Zipline is an automated logistics company whose mission is to provide everyone with instant access to medical supplies through on-demand instant delivery by autonomous drone.
The drones take off from and land at Zipline’s distribution centers. Each drone can carry 1.8 kilos of cargo and fly up to 145 kilometers an hour.
During the launch at the PRC headquarters in Mandaluyong, Zipline announced plans to establish three distribution centers in Visayas, which are expected to fulfill hundreds of deliveries per day to thousands of health facilities.
PRC and Zipline said the service is expected to launch in the summer of 2020, beginning with blood deliveries, but will soon expand to more than 150 critical and life-saving medical products, including vaccines.
“Millions of people in the Philippines can’t access the vital medical products they need because of last-mile transportation challenges,” said Rinaudo. “Zipline’s instant drone delivery service was designed to help solve that problem.”
“This is the idea that commerce should serve people, not people should serve commerce,” asserted Bono, who Rinaudo said has been instrumental in Zipline’s mission to help save tens of thousands of lives worldwide.
“He has been fighting social injustice and working on global public health since before I was born,” said the 32-year-old Rinaudo. “Bono led the way in terms of combating the HIV-AIDS pandemic. There are not very many people, I think, who have really talked the talk and walked and walked the walk as he has.”
Bono takes issues on health programs “very seriously,” especially the fight against AIDS and preventable diseases.
“I have a little bit of background in global health, fighting HIV-AIDS pandemic,” the rockstar said of his advocacies.
Bono cofounded (RED), which aims to raise public awareness about the AIDS crisis, as well as ONE, a global movement campaigning to end extreme poverty by means of lobbying legislators around the world.
“I saw it once, I saw up close how it was, not to get access to life-saving anti-retroviral drugs. I felt that ache, I felt that space between the need and the supply for that need,” he shared.
Especially beneficial to those living in over 4,000 geographically isolated disadvantaged areas or GIDA in the country, health workers simply need to place their orders by text message and receive their deliveries in 30 minutes on average.
Each Zipline distribution center, the company said, can deliver to an area of more than 20,000 square miles serving population of up to 12 million people.
“Your access to healthcare should not depend on the GPS coordinates of where you live,” Rinaudo said.
Bono seconded, “Where you live should never decide whether you live.”