By Mike Auerbach, Editor In Chief
While growing up in the richest and most prosperous country in the world I never thought we would encounter shortages of any kind. I mean after all this is America, land of the free, home of the brave – the land of plenty!
I was a bit too young to remember the oil/gas shortage of 1973, but I do remember the 1978 shortage. The limits on how many gallons of gas you could purchase, the odd/even schedule for buying gas based on your license plate (if your license plate ended in an even number, you could buy gas on even number days). But this shortage was caused by outside forces, there was plenty of gas, but political forces caused a shortage – not manufacturing.
In 1983 we witnessed the “Cabbage Patch Riots”. Launched earlier that year, the squishy—faced dolls became all the rage by the time the holiday season rolled around. Even though major retailers stocked a few hundred at a time it was clearly not enough. People were going nuts trying to get their hands on one of these dolls, and since the supply was limited, many went home empty handed. Frustrations grew and there were reports of violence including hitting, shoving, trampling and even customers being attacked with baseball bats! All for a doll! At the time I couldn’t believe what was happening – just make more I thought. This is America – just crank out some more of those dolls and all will be ok. How can there be a shortage of dolls?
And now we’re in 2020, dealing with this awful COVID-19 pandemic. The encouraging news is so many of the pharmaceutical industry’s best and brightest are working around the clock on treatments and vaccines. And indeed, the hope, the goal is to get a vaccine developed, manufactured and distributed in record time. Literally the world depends on it.
But even if a vaccine is developed in record time – there is a hitch. According to a recent article in Business Insider, when a new vaccine is approved, manufacturers will struggle to source enough glass vials to supply the globe with the vaccine. The bottleneck (no pun intended) for getting a vaccine out to the public might be a manufacturing supply chain issue – not a delay in the science.
Pharmaceutical glass vials are made from specialized glass, and have to be made to much higher standards than the glass used in your beer mug found at the local bar.
And while the global supply of glass vials is currently measured in the hundreds of millions – BILLIONS will be needed once a vaccine is approved and ready for distribution.
But there is hope as evidenced from this quote from the article:
"Quite clearly there will be a need to ramp up production of those vials," Professor Jeffrey Almond, a former vice president of research at Sanofi and current fellow at the University of Oxford's pathology department, told Business Insider.
"I'd be amazed if the people who are producing these things aren't already on it fl at out, going at it all night long," he added.
Once a vaccine is developed it would really be a shame to have its availability limited due to a shortage of glass vials.
The Cabbage Patch Doll riots of ’83 would look miniscule in comparison to what might happen if we couldn’t roll out enough vaccines for the entire world.