Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers are ramping up production, churning out far more doses a week than earlier in the year, progress that is accelerating mass vaccination campaigns in the U.S., writes The Wall Street Journal (March 22, 2021). This is good news and is a followup to our blog (March 21, 2021) how making Covid vaccines is taking away from production of other important drugs. This is a nice place to introduce Figure 7.1 (the four process strategies) to your students.
After a slow start, Pfizer and Moderna have raised output by gaining experience, scaling up production lines and taking other steps like making certain raw materials on their own. Pfizer figured out how to stretch scarce supplies of special filters needed for the vaccine production process by recycling them. (The filters remove certain components from the vaccine during production.) And the company added more high-speed vial-filling lines to its plants.
Moderna took 3 months to make the first 20 million doses of its vaccine last year, but now it is making roughly 40 million a month for the U.S. The U.S. monthly output for the authorized vaccines is expected to reach 132 million doses for March, nearly triple the 48 million in February.
Moderna wasn’t able to produce at maximum capacity right out of the gate because of the need to introduce new equipment and processes in stages. It was still training newly hired workers and encountering issues like equipment malfunctions and holdups in getting replacement parts such as filters. It is planning to further speed output by boosting the number of doses in each vial to 15 from 10. “There has not been a single week since we started that we have not had issues,” said a company exec.
Some 2.5 million people in the U.S. are vaccinated daily on average, up from about 500,000 in early January. The increased output should be enough to fully vaccinate 76 million people in the U.S. in March, 75 million in April, and 89 million more in May.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Which process in Figure 7.1 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text best fits the vaccine manufacture?
- What factors had made the vaccine so difficult to produce?