A few countries that look likely to be oversupplied with vaccines, such as America and
Britain, will try to vaccinate as many people as possible before the winter of 2021. That
will raise ethical questions, as most countries will have to be more strategic. The
pandemic could be brought under control without vaccinating everyone. UNESCO, the
main UN agency organising the global distribution of vaccines, says universal
vaccination will not happen in the “initial years” of the outbreak.
Nada Sanders, a professor of supply-chain management at Northeastern University, says
the availability of a vaccine will not lead immediately to vaccinations, because so much
else needs to be organised. There are concerns about the availability of everything from
medical glass to needles. She says the supply chain needs to be designed and mapped at
a global scale, and worries that this will take longer than expected. Analysts at ubs, a
bank, warn that “fill and finish”, where the vaccine is put into vials and packaged for
distribution, is one of the most significant bottlenecks, followed by shipping. All these
issues will pose problems in 2021.
And there is one final complexity. The first vaccines to arrive will need to be kept cold
during distribution. Currently at least 25% of vaccines arrive in a degraded state due to
problems with the cold chain.
One thing is clear: vaccines will arrive, but they will be distributed unevenly, within
countries and among them, simply because of the scale of the distribution problem. In
the coming year, many people will struggle to understand why loved ones have been
lost to a disease for which there is a vaccine. In 2020 heroic efforts have produced
vaccines in months, rather than years. In 2021 further heroic efforts will be needed to
get them from the laboratory to the clinic.
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