Supply Chain

In Kalamazoo, Mich., a stretch of land the size of a football field has been turned into a staging ground outfitted with 350 large freezers, ready to take delivery of millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine before they can be shipped around the world.

Health authorities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are storing Covid-19 vaccines in secure, undisclosed locations and taking other steps to protect the shots against a looming threat: theft. As the leading vaccine candidates advance closer to use, vaccine makers such as Pfizer Inc. are deploying GPS software for tracking distribution and plotting fake shipments in dummy trucks to confuse criminals. 

Who can forget the the bare supermarket shelves that marked the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic? Everything from toilet paper to canned soup was in short supply, and each trip to the grocery store was a grim lesson in how deeply the virus had disrupted our lives.

The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator. From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

Michigan officials to coordinate shipments to hospitals, health departments, nursing homes. Health care workers expected to receive vaccines. Four COVID-19 vaccines are in Phase 3 clinical trials, although two have paused for safety reasons. 

On Monday, Brad Bigford went through a list of patients who had signed up for a flu shot and started making cancellations. The nurse practitioner and owner of the small business Table Rock Mobile Medicine hadn’t received his complete shipment of vaccines yet for the year. He ran out of them this week.

Billions of people may have to wait for a COVID-19 vaccine because of a dearth of effective cold storage facilities. Most vaccines need to be stored, transported, and administered at consistent, cool temperatures, usually between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. But a number of trial vaccines nearing the end of clinical trials require far lower temperatures, because they are RNA vaccines — a type of vaccine that carries instructions to cells to build protein.

Since the early days of the pandemic, attention has focused on producing a vaccine for COVID-19. With one, it's hoped it will be able to suppress the virus without relying purely on economically challenging control measures. Without one, the world will probably have to live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease. It's unlikely the coronavirus will naturally burn itself out.

When Marshall Fisher recently reviewed the outline of his planned lecture series on global supply chain management at Wharton Business School which begins this month, he realised it required some extensive reworking. “I swallowed hard, decided to throw away the course and start again,” says Mr Fisher, professor of operations, information and decisions. He has since updated almost half his 13 scheduled classes with fresh examples linked to coronavirus. “I thought I just can’t teach the same course again. Every time you open the newspaper you see Covid and supply chains.”

BRINK spoke to Julie Swann, a senior advisor to the CDC on the last national vaccine distribution in 2009 for the H1N1 flu vaccine. She is a professor at North Carolina State University and co-founder of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech.