This is a special story by Soumitra Roy who is Antiviral Pill Supply Chain Lead in one of the world class company. There are many people who worked day and night with their full efforts so that we can get vaccines and medical supplies on time. Let us look what he shared with the society.
(Covid vaccine and Antiviral Pill Supply Chain Lead in a World class Company)
This is Soumitra Roy, Covid vaccine and Antiviral Pill Supply Chain Lead in one of the world class company and I wanted to share my experience with the society.
In March 2020, when pandemic started, nobody could imagine or thought that this would impact the world like anything, lots of people lost their jobs, shops were closed immediately, hospitals don’t have beds to accommodate patients and world is like standstill with so many people died in first 6 months.
The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed healthcare systems around the world, having a knock-on effect on the diagnosis and treatment of other diseases.
The pandemic presents tough choices. National and regional governments, local communities, health, and school systems, as well as families and businesses are being forced to take many difficult decisions: How to re-open safely? How to safeguard people’s lives and protect their livelihoods?
Then group of people started researching and inventing the vaccine which could prevent the spread of virus and they made it and vaccine got approved in Nov 2020 in UK and USA. Then me and my team’s job started like our responsibility is to take the demand from all the hospitals and institutions from 110 countries and make sure those demands generate the requisitions or production orders to the manufacturing site and supply/distribute the vaccines to those 110 countries.
It was a huge undertake to deliver this vaccine because volume was in millions of doses and we delivered 1.2 billion doses in 2021 itself.
But we had couple of bottlenecks while we were shipping vaccines to those 110 countries like:
- How to ship vaccines which needs -40C temperature restriction.
- Suppose someone get 1st dose of vaccine in London on 1st Feb, how do you make sure that same person gets 2nd dose of vaccine on 21st Feb, this needs a lot of attention from supply chain perspective. And we made it via new tool called Vaccine Allocation tool to specify and ship correct qty on time.
- And then how do you handle that big volume or large-scale manufacturing where supply chain issues are there for raw materials and carriers.
We were able to resolve all the above issues slowly like we came up with a new vaccine which doesn’t need that temperature restriction and can be stored in room temperature and then we had introduced 2 new manufacturing sites to produce and 6 LSP/warehouses to store the vaccines and ship out millions of doses globally to 110 countries.
I am proud to be part of this vaccine supply chain effort, which helps millions of people in need and making an impact to the society.
We are happy to share efforts that people did during this pandemic situation and we salute their efforts from depth of our hearts.
BIOTECH WORLD INDIA
JAI HIND
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