Tag: Moderna

OM in the News: The Wasted Vaccines

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)

Germany may discard 3 million COVID-19 vials

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?

 

OM in the News: Vaccine Manufacturing in U.S. Races Ahead

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.

pfizer2

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:

  1. Which process in Figure 7.1 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text best fits the vaccine manufacture?
  2. What factors had made the vaccine so difficult to produce?