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Perspective: Pharma Supply Chain—Not Ready for a Vaccine Just Yet

While the desire to move at warp speed may be strong, manufacturers and regulators stay the course for safety.

Keren Sookne, director of editorial content at Healthcare Packaging
Keren Sookne, director of editorial content at Healthcare Packaging

Regardless of headlines in the news touting aggressive fall/winter target dates, vaccines and the accompanying pharmaceutical supply chain are not ready to deliver in mere weeks.

There are some truly amazing efforts around manufacturing COVID-19 testing, treatments, and PPE. Plants have switched gears in weeks or months, some scaling from the thousands to millions of parts per week.

But as a former engineer at a pharmaceutical plant, I can say that manufacturing changes on this scale for biopharma products tend not to happen so quickly, even in unprecedented times.

While packaging suppliers make strides, the U.S. needs work in domestic production of small parts like vials and stoppers for hundreds of millions of people. Beyond packaging and logistics (what our publication focuses on), an effective vaccine candidate— and thus manufacturing and storage conditions—have not been selected or scaled up.

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