Design and Operation of the Vaccine Distribution Supply Chain

Throughout 2020 and into 2021, the United States and the rest of the world experienced the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first months of the pandemic, many types of items needed to care for patients and to protect healthcare workers were in extremely short supply. Furthermore, these items were also needed to protect others in virtually all workplaces, especially in nursing homes, long-term healthcare facilities, food-processing plants, and retail settings. The inadequacies of the existent public health system’s policies and operational preparedness were all too evident in the United States, although some believed otherwise prior to the pandemic’s emergence. The 5 Principles of Supply Chain Management articulated in Chap. 1 were absent at the advent of the pandemic. The relationships among supply chain partners who created and delivered the many needed items were mostly at the communicator level, as defined in Chap. 1 . Clearly, in the future, the system must ensure partners in these supply chains act in a truly collaborative manner. Significant investments by governments and public enterprises will be required to do so. Manufacturing capacities, as well as associated supply chains, must be created and sustained for all needed items. In summary, the design and operation of supply chains for responding to future events, such as a pandemic, must be based on the 5 Principles and observations we have established in Chap. 1 . Consequently, all these supply chain relationships should be collaborative. In the final chapter, we address the problem of designing and operating a system for distributing vaccines during a pandemic. Based on the fundamental Principles as they apply to this problem, we develop a mathematically based rationale for the system’s objective. We demonstrate how the pooling concept presented in Chapter three should guide the system’s design. We develop models and computationally tractable algorithms for allocating vaccine supplies every day throughout a multi-echelon distribution system. We provide an example that demonstrates the importance of designing the system based on guiding principles using data from the state of New Hampshire. We conclude the chapter with a review of the way vaccines were distributed and administered in the United States during the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data provided by the CDC, we observe that the approach used was not nearly as effective as it might have been.