Covid 19 vaccine supply chain

 The pandemic of COVID-19 has strangled both the global economy and its population. Between May 16 and May 25, the number of people infected by one COVID-19 patient on average (known as the effective reproduction number or R of the disease) was 1.23, down from 1.29 between April 13 and May 4 and from 1.83 between March 4 and April 11, according to calculations by Sitabhra Sinha, a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai.

This means that between March 4 and April 11, at an R0 of 1.83, if 25 people had had COVID-19, they would have transmitted it to about 45 people while they were infectious. At the current R of 1.23, 25 people would infect 30, on average. With the curve on a rise, its the need of the hour to tackle the spread as soon as possible.It takes a lot of time for the successful introduction of a vaccine into the market. But its the highest priority which should be given by all the nations to curb the spread of the covid-19 pandemic.

The most important question that arise once the vaccine is developed would be : how to accelerate the availability of vaccine once its available? How to scale up the production ? how to reduce the lead time ? 

Scaling up the production is considered a huge barrier for addressing the challenge as there are only limited number of manufacturers. Also entering the vaccine market is very risky as certain vaccines are dedicated to certain diseases so you  might not use it once the disease is gone.There must be some funding from the government to push the  private manufacturers to take up the production.Vaccines are based on two things : protein based or Mrna based. Mrna based is more sophisticated in terms of technology and faster for the manufactures to produce. But facilities are required for such facilities.   

Vaccines goes through different stages :

  1) raw material stage : make sure we have reliable vendors as suppliers who deliver quality raw material without delay. Another challenge is maintaining the whole process between 2 degree Celsius and 8 degree Celsius. So the vaccine must be maintained at this temperature from the starting of the manufacturing process till it reaches the consumer.

2) intermediary stage : testing from regulatory agency must happen which takes a lot of time if  parallelization in terms of testing doesn't  happen.

3)packaging : single doze buyers or multidoze buyers. Here, single doze buyers don't waste the products.This will impact the delivery time because the single doze buyers will reduce the wastage but they reduce the capacity and storage. lets say I have supply limit of about 100 million dozes and now filling one single doze or ten doze buyers would really impact because the bottleneck here is not the volume but the packaging . Taking less space and less time from the capacity and production in terms of packaging would impact the delivery time .  

·        Challenges to supply: not many equipments for making Mrna vaccines which can be made fast but needs sophisticated machines, raw materials as reliable vendors, quality raw materials, testing for the vaccines.

As mentioned above, Lead time between the manufacturing and immunisation of a person must be less. The vaccine must be stored in a temperature between 2 degree Celsius to 8 degree Celsius throughout the process. Methods to achieve this can be through Drones (in places where it is permitted).One medical product delivery company Zipline, has reduced the transportation time of key medicines from several days to two hours with the help of drone. This is mostly helpful in rough terrains than in cities.

 

Other challenge is the huge demand in the market. This will seek for a larger supply. There is also an urgent need for the vaccines to curb the spread. Identification of the most vulnerable segment in the market is of utmost importance in such a scenario. It must be ensured that the supply reaches this vulnerable segment and this must be the priority. Along with the vaccine, the supply of syringes, needles etc must be noted while planning for the smooth flowing supply chain.The syringes, needles would be acquired from third parties but these are as much important as he vaccine.

For this Global supply chain to be effectively operating companies must be accurate with the prediction of the number of vaccine required. Covid-19 is a new fix that they whole world is in. but there are plenitude of data to back the development of the approach. He data from the past pandemic outbreak like past supply chain vaccines, distribution methods, census data, data about the number of affected individuals etc can be used to predict the demand.

Challenge is the plenitude of data in hand and for manually accessing and analyzing data will lead to increased lead time. Using the power of AI would help us to solve the problem here.

To work on the resiliency of supply chain, simulation can be made use.This will enable the organisations to find the blind spot where they could miss out possible disruptions in the supply chain and streamline the process.

what do you guys think about it ??💭