International team develops new vaccine distribution model

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell’s Ithaca campus, Singapore University of Technology and Design, and San Jose State University in California have developed a model for optimizing the dispensing of vaccines during pandemics that uses a new measure of success for such efforts. The new model – detailed in a paper published May 23 in the International Journal of Production Economics, expands the concept of vaccine coverage to include vaccinated person-days (VPDs), which prioritizes both the number of people vaccinated and the speed of getting shots into arms. The primary goal of distributing vaccines in response to a pandemic is to protect the most people as quickly as possible. Shorter timeframes mean fewer infections, hospitalizations, deaths and opportunities for new strains to emerge compared with longer timeframes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers produced the first two vaccine doses in record time – within 300 to 400 days of U.S. Food and Drug...