H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine supply chains

The New York Times has had excellent coverage on the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine production problems, which have resulted in shortages throughout the US with citizens clamoring for information and long lines at vaccination stations, where they can be located, assuming that any vaccine has been delivered. The article, Shortage of Vaccine Poses Political Test for Obama, emphasizes the political ramifications of the government's overoptimistic projections of vaccine availability. It also links to another article that documents the problems encountered, still ongoing, with the vaccine supply chain from the manufacturing through the distribution and delivery.The technologies of vaccine production have, for the most part, not changed over decades and require the growing of the vaccines in eggs. Yields may be quite uncertain and that was the case for the H1N1 vaccine. On top of this problem, there were insufficient dispensers available, where and when needed, for both the nasal mist variety and the inoculation one, which demonstrates not only poor planning but inadequacies in this critical needs supply chain. Vaccine producers are now an oligopoly and there are only a few firms involved in producing for the US population.

Both China and Australia have been giving their citizens the H1N1 vaccine for awhile now. It is very frustrating that in the US better emergency preparedness was not done for vaccine production and distribution. Citizens do not need the added anxiety in this economic climate.What pleases me is that some school districts have realized that closing schools may be in the best interest at this time to assist in the minimization of flu transmission and in the recovery of those who are sick. Indeed, President Obama has declared a national emergency because of the swine flu but some school districts are still reluctant to close the schools and some are not even informing parents as to the seriousness of the spread of the flu.


The US must invest in its vaccine supply chains and begin to regain its manufacturing strength and know-how. This is an issue of not only emergency preparedness, healthcare, but also one of national security.

The outstanding talk that Professor Jose Holquin-Veras gave last Friday in our Speaker Series on emergency logistics has now been made available and can be found, in pdf format, here. We thank him for trying to educate FEMA post-Katrina and we hope that others can learn before it is too late. We also extend our sincerest thanks for making his presentations slides available.

If I had the resources available I would make sure that all of the talks in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series are videotaped and put online. Coincidentally, last May, I was invited to give a talk on global supply chains and vulnerabilities at the University of California Davis, just as the swine flu was breaking out last Spring. I decided to minimize the risk and my talk was videostreamed. It is now available online, thanks to the Institute for Transportation Studies there. It was certainly an interesting experience to give a talk to an audience thousands of miles away!

We have been conducting research on network design for such problems and have completed a study. The paper is now in the refereeing stage.

Supply chain risk management and the swine flu

Given the escalating news about the swine flu, I thought that, as a researcher in supply chains and risk management, it would be wise to step back and to think about the major issues. Already in our town of Amherst, Massachusetts, stores have sold out of face masks and hand sanitizers and the demand for these products is, obviously, great. We are reading about travelers from Mexico being isolated as they arrive in China and a hotel in Hong Kong essentially quarantined along with its guests. Clearly, corporations as well as governments will be faced with how best to deliver needed supplies, in the case of an escalating health crisis, while, at the same time, trying to minimize risk. Here we can think of risk in a broad sense and even include the risk of contagion and spreading the disease.

In 2005, we published a paper in the European Journal of Operational Research, which developed a framework that captured the interactions of decision-makers in multitiered supply chains under risk and uncertainty and also allowed for electronic commerce. I suspect, given the reality of the swine flu and its spread, that we will be seeing more electronic transactions and communications, since "social distancing" is one way of stemming the dissemination of contagious illnesses. The spread of the swine flu is now global in nature and the impact on supply chains, hence, can also be expected to be global. Here you can read about our global supply chain network research and risk management where we also discussed SARS. Clearly, the issues are dynamic in nature, and it will be very interesting to see how this latest global health crisis affects the production of goods and supply chains, including humanitarian ones. In a study on the dynamics of global supply chains and risk management we track the evolution over time of decision-makers' optimal decisions under risk and uncertainty.

Swine Flu, Travel, and Talk at University of California Davis

Today, the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland raised the alert level of the increasing swine flu outbreak one notch to just one level below a pandemic. Tomorrow I was scheduled to fly through Las Vegas to Sacramento, California, where I was to give a talk May 1, 2009 at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California Davis. The announcement for my talk has been posted in this speaker series. I was so looking forward to seeing colleagues there, including Professor Patricia L. Mokhtarian and Professor Yueyue Fan, who invited me to speak. Also, one of our doctoral students at UMass Amherst, Deanna Kennedy, whose family is living in the Davis area was planning on coming to my talk. Professor Mokhtarian and I, along with Professor June Dong, whom I have written about on this blog, had a multi-year National Science Foundation grant on centralized versus decentralized decision-making on complex networks. It was a fantastic project and collaboration, which generated numerous papers as well several books, including the book, "Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age," co-authored with June Dong.

However, I was advised that, given the increasing numbers of swine flu cases in California, New York, with cases identified even in Nevada and now in eastern Massachusetts, not to fly. There have been several cases in the Sacramento area and a school there has been closed. The staff at the Sacramento airport has been disinfecting certain areas twice an hour -- a thought, somehow, that did not give me much reassurance. This state of events came on so suddenly at a time when one would think the usual flu season is over and done with -- but this is not a usual flu and, presently, there is no vaccine for it.

What can one do in such a situation? Tomorrow we will be testing the videoconferencing equipment at the Isenberg School of Management and I will be working with the information technology counterparts at UC Davis to check out what the streaming will look like on their side. The talk is scheduled for Friday, 1:30PM California time, which corresponds to 4:30PM Eastern Standard time.

This will be an interesting/novel experience. I love to interact with an audience and we will have to do the best that we can. Ironically or, propitiously, I will be talking about supply chain vulnerabilities and synergies and will try to also bring the reality of the swine flu crisis into the conversations. Our (Anna Nagurney's and Qiang "Patrick" Qiang's) new book, "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in a World of Uncertainty," which is being published by Wiley will be out in a few weeks and the topic could not be more timely.