As demand for COVID-19 vaccines collapses in many areas of the U.S., states are scrambling to use stockpiles of doses before they expire and have to be added to the millions that have already gone to waste. “It’s sad to say I’m in the process of throwing 30 million doses in the garbage because nobody wants them. We have a big demand problem,” says Moderna’s CEO in the Washington Examiner (May 26, 2022)
Nearly 1.5 million doses in Michigan, 1.45 million in North Carolina, 1 million in Illinois, and almost 725,000 doses in Washington couldn’t be used. The national rate of wasted doses is about 9.5% of the more than 687 million doses that have been delivered. That equates to about 65 million doses.
The problem is not unique to the U.S. More than a million doses of the Russian Sputnik vaccine expired this week in Guatemala, because nobody wanted to take the shot. The pandemic has killed nearly 6 million people and shattered economies across the globe, and every dose that goes to waste feels like a potentially missed opportunity in preventing serious disease.
It also comes only about a year after people desperate to get the vaccine attempted to jump in line to get ahead of those deemed higher priority. Hospital board members donors around the U.S. got early access or offers for vaccinations, raising complaints about favoritism and inequity at a time when the developing world had virtually no doses.
And many poorer nations still have low vaccine rates, including 13 countries in Africa with less than 5% of their population fully vaccinated. They are plagued by unpredictable deliveries, weak health care systems, vaccine hesitancy and some supply issues. Redistributing states’ excess doses to other nations is not feasible because of the difficulty in transporting the shots, which must remain cold, in addition to not being cost effective because of the relatively small number concentrated at sites.
With demand so low, states will undoubtedly be confronted with more waste in the months ahead. Idaho, for example, has 230,000 doses on hand but is only averaging fewer than 2,000 doses administered a week. West Virginia has offered to transfer Pfizer adult doses to nearby states. States are ordering prudently, paralleling the drop in demand. The minimum order for Pfizer used to be nearly 1,200 doses but now it’s 100.
Classroom discussion questions:
1. Why does the EOQ inventory model described in Chapter 12 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text not work well for this item?
2. What forecasting models in Chapter 4 could be used to predict demand for the shots?