A Shot in the Arm

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the December 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

December 2021

Each December, the focus of the issue is our annual Executive Guide to Supply Chain Resources. This is a comprehensive guide to services, products and educational opportunities targeted specifically to supply chain professionals. But, as with years past, we’re also featuring several articles we trust will give you something to think about in the coming year.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, in what ultimately became perhaps the greatest global supply chain disruption since World War II, employees began working from home, consumers were battling to hoard toilet paper (detailing the origins of this and other shortages) and companies were navigating the combined impacts of changing consumer demand, disrupted suppliers, fractured transportation links and new workplace regulations. At the same time, I began watching another story unfolding in the laboratories of universities and pharmaceutical companies. Biomedical scientists and engineers around the world began a race to save civilization from the virus by developing a vaccine. Those scientists and engineers seemed to face very long odds of success in any reasonable timeframe given both the very long gestation periods typically required to create just the candidate vaccines for testing and the low rate of subsequent approvals of tested vaccines.

Developing a safe and effective vaccine wasn’t the end of the challenge; it was just a first step in what would become the greatest product launch in human history: mass-producing these vaccines, distributing them to vaccination sites around the world and getting billions of people to come and get vaccinated. Mass-producing the vaccine meant creating all the supply chains needed to manufacture all the ingredients and raw materials required for the vaccine, many of which had been niche laboratory chemicals. Getting to scale entailed overcoming shortages of materials and industrial capacity.

Doing this required bringing the full might of science, engineering, supply chain processes and government resources to combat a critical global problem. Each of these four realms of human endeavor faced, and largely overcame, serious obstacles in pursuit of the goal of preventing more death, disease and economic upheaval from COVID-19. Overall, the great race to vaccinate humanity holds many lessons about product development, manufacturing, creating new supply chains, distribution and customer adoption of highly innovative, revolutionary products.

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