Supply Chain

During the coronavirus pandemic, the world has become reliant on personal protective equipment, or PPE. Most of this essential gear, from masks to gowns to goggles, comes from China -- and experts in the U.S. say this foreign dependence is problematic. Bur for now, the country where the virus originated is producing much of what's needed to fight it off. Special correspondent Patrick Fok reports.

States have been working hard on developing COVID-19 vaccine distribution plans. By the time the vaccine becomes available, about 1 in 4 people in the country may have recovered from COVID-19 and therefore be partially immune, and others who need the vaccine most may avoid it. The distribution plans should therefore address both possible immunity and vaccine reluctance as demand-side issues.

After shelves were emptied of goods like toilet paper, canned food and hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic, Chicago-area grocery stores and suppliers are stocking up to avert shortages as coronavirus cases rise in Illinois. On Thursday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a 10 p.m. curfew on all nonessential city businesses and a prohibition on indoor service at bars without food licenses. Gov. J.B. Pritzker also announced stricter rules for some counties, including DuPage, Kane, Will and Kankakee.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., a stretch of land the size of a football field has been turned into a staging ground outfitted with 350 large freezers, ready to take delivery of millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccine before they can be shipped around the world.

Health authorities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are storing Covid-19 vaccines in secure, undisclosed locations and taking other steps to protect the shots against a looming threat: theft. As the leading vaccine candidates advance closer to use, vaccine makers such as Pfizer Inc. are deploying GPS software for tracking distribution and plotting fake shipments in dummy trucks to confuse criminals. 

Who can forget the the bare supermarket shelves that marked the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic? Everything from toilet paper to canned soup was in short supply, and each trip to the grocery store was a grim lesson in how deeply the virus had disrupted our lives.

The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator. From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

Michigan officials to coordinate shipments to hospitals, health departments, nursing homes. Health care workers expected to receive vaccines. Four COVID-19 vaccines are in Phase 3 clinical trials, although two have paused for safety reasons. 

On Monday, Brad Bigford went through a list of patients who had signed up for a flu shot and started making cancellations. The nurse practitioner and owner of the small business Table Rock Mobile Medicine hadn’t received his complete shipment of vaccines yet for the year. He ran out of them this week.

Billions of people may have to wait for a COVID-19 vaccine because of a dearth of effective cold storage facilities. Most vaccines need to be stored, transported, and administered at consistent, cool temperatures, usually between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. But a number of trial vaccines nearing the end of clinical trials require far lower temperatures, because they are RNA vaccines — a type of vaccine that carries instructions to cells to build protein.