The France Supply Chain association calls for national coordination of the Vaccine Supply Chain.

Let's prepare efficiently for the landing of the millions of vaccines against Covid-19!

It is one thing to define a public policy for vaccination against Covid-19, it is quite another to ensure that it is properly implemented. Faced with the complexity of delivering millions of doses, only national and transversal coordination will ensure a smooth vaccination campaign. The France Supply Chain association offers its assistance to the Public Authorities and recommends the creation of a national Vaccine Supply Chain Council. With local relays, it would bring together, without silos, public authorities, logistics service providers, industrialists and technological companies.

Risks of queues, dose breaks, unused ordered stocks, trafficking of vaccines by ill-intentioned people... Never has the proper implementation of public policy been so crucial. Choosing the most effective vaccine(s), deciding who will be the priority beneficiaries and at what pace is a major component of public policy. But ensuring the collective capacity of all stakeholders to keep pace with the pace of administering them, across the country, is the second. Essential.

For the challenge is colossal, the building site huge, the risk of explosive traffic jams for a population already in chronic "bad shape".

Let's put the numbers down. If we take the hypothesis of targeting 60% of the 65 million French people, or 39 million people. If the vaccine is administered in two parts, three weeks apart, that represents 78 million injections of doses to be administered. Over three months, 866,000 injections per day will have to be given and over four months, 650,000.

To give an idea, currently between 2 million and 2.5 million PCR/antigen tests are performed per week. This rate has taken several months. Remember the three-hour queues in front of the laboratories!

Add to this the complexity of managing several vaccines (six have already been contracted) with two major uncertainties: their nature (storage at -70°C for at least one of them) and dates of availability.

The control of vaccination throughout the country requires the coordination of all the actors, and there are many of them, in what could be called the Vaccine Supply Chain.

This coordination requires a steering and a global approach as do the giants of industry or commerce with a real industrial and commercial plan. All these players have one thing in common: they start from demand rather than supply and work beyond their silos.

This counter-intuitive approach of planning upstream is the only one that works. For the time being, the "demand" variable seems to be in the process of being defined: not only in terms of the number of French people to be vaccinated and how long it will take, but also in terms of who will be given priority: carers, people at risk, students about to take an exam....

Only the actual need will make it possible to size the means. In order to reach these diverse audiences, what will be the means of dissemination (city medicine, hospitals, field hospitals managed by the army...) as well as the constraints of storage and conservation?

Let's take it up a notch: where will the stocks be positioned, will they come directly from production sites close to the vaccination sites? What will be the conditions for respecting the cold chain in the different warehouses? And from there, what will be the most appropriate means of transport and distribution?

Several logistics companies have set up taskforces to organise their resources and propose responses to the challenge of mass procurement.

France Supply Chain calls for national coordination of the Vaccine Supply Chain.

This coordination is national in scope and is crucial at three levels:

• Demand management: how much, where and at what rate (2 injections in 3 weeks)
• Controlling delivery to the vaccine administration points
• Supply management

This national coordination must have its relays , themselves well coordinated: Regional Health Agencies, prefects, city medicine, partners in the world of transport...

Finally, digital solutions are essential to ensure this complex transversal management and its execution. We are not in a tight flow but in the field of the unforeseen where we have to adapt constantly.

"In order to properly manage and streamline the administration of vaccines in our country, France must bring together its best professionals to prepare, organise and manage vaccination throughout the country," says Yann de Feraudy, President of France Supply Chain. "With the health crisis, the Supply Chain Made in France has revealed even more its strategic role and its capacity to react. The experts of France Supply Chain offer their support to the Ministry of Health and are available as needed to define the operational framework. Let's give ourselves together all the means to fight uncertainty. Our only ambition is to contribute to the smooth administration of vaccines.

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