News Room

It's been three weeks since the COVID-19 vaccines began arriving at hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. Operation Warp Speed—the U.S. vaccination development, testing, and distribution effort—had made 20 million vaccine doses available by the end of 2020. Yet the U.S. is only approaching 5.5 million vaccines administered so far. Public health experts, policymakers, and the leaders of Operation Warp Speed agree: The U.S. must pick up the pace of vaccination.

Julie Swann, department head of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University, joins CBSN's Lana Zak to discuss President-elect Joe Biden's announcement to release more coronavirus vaccine doses and what manufacturers can do to increase vaccine production.

A sluggish rollout of Covid-19 vaccines across the U.S. highlights the challenges of a decentralized distribution plan that relies on states and localities to handle the complicated last-mile logistics of getting shots into people’s arms, supply-chain experts say. More than 22 million doses had been distributed to states and other jurisdictions as of Friday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while 6.7 million people had received their first shot by that point. The figures were short of the U.S. goal of 20 million vaccinations by the end of 2020, and communities and states were still reporting bottlenecks this month as they managed their inoculation programs.

It’s a miracle of modern medicine that scientists were able to develop multiple successful vaccines against Covid-19, a disease that wasn’t even on their radar a year ago. But so far, the global effort to roll out these vaccines and distribute them to vulnerable people is off to a slow start. According to a tracker developed by OurWorldInData—a research partnership between the University of Oxford and the British non-profit Global Change Data Lab—three countries have vaccinated a higher proportion of their populations than the rest of the world: Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain.

After the initial excitement following the authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccines, a harsh reality set in. People who want a vaccine can’t get it, some counties have more than others and older people are camping out for it the way they once might have for tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert. All of this would seem to be an indication of supply chain problems or systems breakdowns. In fact, it’s more about a shortage of employees to support the supply chains and distributions. Some states are even considering calling up the National Guard.