US Covid-19 vaccination plan limits roll-out rate, say supply chain experts

“If you said you had the priority of vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible, they would have conducted the campaign differently,” Julie Swann, a professor and head of the industrial and systems engineering department at the North Carolina State University, said. . “But that’s not what they were told.”

Instead of trying to stop the spread of distribution in communities, dr. Swann, who advised the CDC during the H1N1 pandemic, said the focus is on reducing mortality rates, especially among high-risk populations.

Supply chain experts attribute the delays in part to the burdens often underfunded by state and local health agencies already stretched to the limit by the coronavirus pandemic, as well as communication problems, including confusion over how many doses the states would receive.

But experts are also pointing to the guidance of a federal vaccine advisory panel on who should be vaccinated first, which recommends that the limited initial dose be administered to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities.

The president’s transition team, Joe Biden, said on Friday he would release almost all available doses to speed up the spread.

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio clashed over distribution, while the governor criticized hospitals for administering doses, and the mayor called for more flexibility regarding state guidelines on who can be vaccinated.

The U.S. Covid-19 vaccine distribution strategy is focused on supply, says Philip Palin, a writer and resilience expert who advises governments and businesses to prepare for catastrophic events. Vaccinations are assigned to targeted groups, he said, as opposed to more high-velocity supply chains, which are more common and mostly demand-driven.

He said the manufacture and distribution of the first two vaccines in the US – those manufactured by Pfizer Inc.

and BioNTech SE in a joint program and by Moderna Inc.

—Effectively surpasses the ability of those administering the vaccines to adhere to current guidelines to determine vaccination priorities. “What has not happened yet is a sufficient consumption of the distributed supply,” said Mr. Palin said.

To expedite vaccinations, Mr. Palin said, authorities can work with community organizations and local governments to identify potential vaccination sites and focus on areas where the need for the vaccine is greatest.

If doses continue on the current path, vaccination coordination may become more difficult as authorities move to the wider population, said Pinar Keskinocak, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and director of the school’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems said.

“Ideally, we need a kind of online system where you log in with your information and location, and are informed when it’s time to get your vaccine,” said Dr. Keskinocak said. “It seems that we do not have a very concrete plan at local level on how we are going to store this vaccine in people’s arms.”

Covid-19 vaccination programs in Europe are also experiencing delays amid a surge in infections in countries with divergent approaches to spreading the shots.

In the US, state and local health departments have usually had a lot of flexibility for such campaigns, said dr. Swann said. ‘This would allow North Dakota to spread differently than New York. That’s why Arizona, with its Native American reservations and a different kind of infrastructure, is spreading differently than California, ” she said.

Centralized vaccination efforts tend to be faster, but may face other challenges, said Dr. Swann said. For example, deploying the military to help vaccinate people is likely to resist in some parts of the US, she said.

But, the dr. Swann said, “if the US were to decide to say, ‘We need to take things down because our hospitals are overwhelmed,’ then they can absolutely run mass vaccination clinics, and that would be a lot more efficient.”

Write to Jennifer Smith by [email protected]