Will the pharma industry be quick enough to overcome 3 supply chain hurdles to global immunisation against Covid-19?

Despite the pharma industry's impressive achievements in covid-19 vaccine development, approval and rollout through accelerated timescales, only 3.76 billion covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally to date. Another 12 billion doses are needed urgently to achieve global immunisation.

Hopes of lives and economies returning to a sense of normality depends on the vaccination of a substantial proportion of the global population against the virus.

If large populations around the world remain unvaccinated, new variants of the virus will continue to emerge, including some that might be able to evade existing vaccines.

Even after huge investment, scaling up production of vaccines means quickly overcoming 3 supply chain hurdles presented by the unprecedented scale of demand.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Veena Mallya Burkinshaw is a supply chain transformation programme specialist, proven within the pharmaceuticals and consumer healthcare sectors. Skilled in translating business vision into programme strategy and leading operational efficiency and resilience programmes.

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1. Availability of raw materials

vaccines require hundreds of individual materials to make the finished product; materials that are mostly sourced from different countries. The scale of demand has resulted in delays and challenges, stressing the supply chain severely.

Even with many suppliers expanding their capacity and output, supply lead-times have increased significantly. When suppliers are unable to meet demand, they are forced to prioritise supply.

In addition to the shortage and delays caused by the large-scale demand for materials, local governments are curbing material exports. Despite previous commitments made with foreign customers, export controls are put in place in a desperate attempt to manage their own crisis and immunise local population.

Supply chains need to re-evaluate their own inventory management to reduce the risk of stock-outs of key raw materials.

While it is not straightforward or quick to bring on and qualify new suppliers, efforts to increase and diversify supplier base is vital for supply chains to maintain continuous production of vaccines.

2. Manufacturing capacity

The challenge in the early part of the pandemic was that we did not have vaccines for Covid. Now we have multiple vaccines approved, the challenge for 2021 and beyond is whether there is enough manufacturing capacity to fully vaccinate the entire global population in a short period of time.

Pre-Covid, vaccine manufacturers produced between 3.5 to 5.5 billion doses of all vaccines in total every year worldwide, with only very few countries having domestic manufacturing capacity.

Industry faces a daunting task of manufacturing the remaining 12 billion doses very fast. Scaling up vaccine production is challenging; it takes time to build and secure regulatory validation for a new large-scale manufacturing facility.

Vaccine manufacturers have already invested in additional capacity through scaling up in-house manufacturing and scaling out by partnering with other manufacturers. Merck, Sanofi, GSK, and Novartis have agreed to manufacture vaccines for BioNTech, CureVac and J&J in their factories.

While these partnerships are effectively redeploying some of their existing capacity, more such collaboration is needed to maximise the global manufacturing output to meet the highly time sensitive and large-scale demand.

It is also worth considering whether manufacturing capacity on-reserve for other less critical vaccine programmes can be redeployed to maximize Covid vaccines production.

Because Covid vaccines are new products that have been developed and rolled out in a record timeline, there are also opportunities for manufacturers to take a closer look at every stage of the manufacturing process to optimise output.

3. Distribution of vaccines

the pandemic put the logistics world under the spotlight. Despite the lock downs and border closures deteriorating their operating environment, their efforts towards maintaining continuity of supply of essential goods has been commendable. They now face a new challenge, transporting billions of doses of the vaccines globally.

• Temperature Control

To ensure both the efficacy and safety of vaccines, they need to be maintained at a specific temperature in an unbroken state throughout their movement from the production sites to the eventual point of administration.

Whilst temperature control is a standard requirement for most vaccines and other pharma products, some of the Covid vaccines are required be maintained at extremely low temperatures (-70 Degree Celsius). Countries with most developed logistics infrastructures lack cold chain networks that can meet these requirements.

Failure to regulate and monitor storage temperatures through out the distribution chain will unfortunately result in wastage of vaccines.

• Freight Capacity

The need to vaccinate the global population as quickly as possible has driven the demand for vaccines to be transported by air. Pre-pandemic, over 50% of the air freight relied on passenger planes. This capacity has diminished significantly due to the drop in the passenger flight operations and a big portion of the passenger fleet remaining grounded.

As air freight costs continue to increase and supply demand exceeds available air freight capacity, manufacturers will need to start considering sea freight to take a considerable share of the transport, especially for vaccines that are low cost and do not have extreme cold chain requirements.

Road transport remains the most effective mode to move vaccines over short distances however, even this has faced significant capacity issues due to boom in e-commerce and changing consumer behaviours.

As freight capacity continues to be a challenge in 2021 and beyond, vaccines manufacturers will benefit from working closely with the logistics industry to invest in effective distribution strategy and mechanisms to drive timely and compliant distribution of vaccines globally.

By not proactively resolving and monitoring these problems, vaccines manufacturers risk not meeting the time sensitive demand resulting in reputational damage, loss of revenue and most importantly, not meeting their commitment to ending the pandemic and saving lives globally.

To meet this enormous global challenge, vaccine manufacturers must have a clear vision which encompasses maximising vaccine rollout through building supply chain resilience and optimising efficiency. A vision that will need to be realised through a formal and dedicated programme.

Veena can be contacted on +447515392487 or [email protected].