News Room

The spoilage of nearly 2,000 COVID-19 vaccines at the VA Medical Center in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood sparked a reaction from people in the city. Anna Nagurney, a professor of operations management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is an expert in supply chains, including vaccine rollouts. She says the loss of 1,900 vaccine doses should never have happened. "I think it's actually unforgivable," she said. "We cannot afford to be wasting our vaccines.

Of the many things that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear to us, surely one of them is a newfound realization that public health has become increasingly complex. Understanding the challenges to public health – that is, the task of guarding the well-being of the U.S. population – is essential now more than ever. As an engineer, design futurist and graduate program director, I have seen how COVID-19 has transformed how public health preparedness is viewed and understood. Some say the pandemic has delivered an urgency for a reimagining of public health.

Cannabis 2.0 Rarely does an entirely new industry emerge in packaging and processing, but the legalization of cannabis for medical and adult-use did just that. Sit in as Healthcare Packaging Editor Keren Sookne and PMMI Media Group’s VP of Content Jim Chrzan chat with Greg Flickinger of Green Thumb International (GTI) about the industry’s response to cannabis packaging. The future is now! If your company is not automating, you risk falling behind your competitors.  See how robots are now uncaged and cobots are working safely alongside humans. Discover how quickly automation offers ROI, the latest standards and what trends and research indicate for the continuing wave of robotic growth.

Pay cuts and salary freezes have become an unfortunate hallmark of the Covid-19 recession. Over seven million employees have seen their wages drop since March, and a great many others have had their pay frozen. But a handful of companies have bucked this trend and increased pay despite the economic crisis. In November, yogurt maker Chobani announced that it was raising its workers’ lowest hourly wage from $13 to $15; the floor was set at $18 in high-cost centers like New York. E-furniture retailer Wayfair followed suit last week with a $15 minimum.

During an afternoon news conference Thursday, President Joe Biden was very blunt saying it’s going to take months to get the majority of Americans vaccinated against COVID-19. It’s been a slow process, but Channel 2′s Matt Johnson got some insight about how things could really ramp up now that a new administration is in place. Jose Cordero is a University of Georgia professor who also served on Biden’s transition team as an expert in vaccine distribution. “It’s an extremely complex process to get the vaccine to everyone,” Cordero told Johnson. He says one thing that needed improvement was cooperation between states and the federal government.

“There was not the kind of support that is really needed to get the vaccine from the warehouse to every household,” Cordero said.