The Vaccine Supply Chain: A Call for Resilience Analytics to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Production and Distribution

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of resilience in supply chains, as global networks fail from disruptions at single nodes and connections. Through an overview of the existing vaccine and pharmaceutical supply chain publications focusing on resilience, as well as recent papers reporting modeling of resilience in supply chains across multiple fields, we find that models for supply chain resilience are few and most of them are focused on individual dimensions of resilience rather than on comprehensive strategy necessary for scaling up vaccine production and distribution in emergency settings. We find that COVID19 resulted in a wave of interest to supply chain resilience, but publications from 2020 are narrow in focus and largely qualitative in nature; evidence-based models and measures are rare. Further, publications often focus exclusively on specific portions of the specific supply chain of interest, excluding associated supporting networks, such as transportation, social and command and control (C2) necessary for vaccine production and equitable distribution. This lack of network analysis is a major gap in the literature that needs to be bridged in order to create methods of real-time analysis and decision tools for the COVID19 vaccine supply chain. We conclude that a comprehensive, quantitative approach to network resilience that encompasses the supply chain in the context of other social and physical networks is needed in order to address the emerging challenges of a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination program. We further find that the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the necessity of positioning supply chain resilience within a multi-network context and formally incorporating temporal dimensions into analysis through the NAS definition of resilience, plan, absorb, recover, adapt, to ensure essential needs are met across all dimensions of society.