“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of many products that many of us take for granted — from toilet paper to hand sanitizer to vaccines. The challenge with getting some of those products to market was around retooling manufacturing facilities and ensuring that enough raw materials could be sourced.
In the case of medicines and vaccines, the availability of treatments is limited by a global supply chain needed to produce the medicines/vaccines and a culture of business risk aversion by the private sector during normal times because the cost to develop medicines is extremely high.”
That’s Kelvin Lee, director of USA Manufacturing’s National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) and Gore Professor of Chemical Biomolecular Engineering at UD. He can speak to the role government can, and must play, in addressing the supply chain problems and manufacturing obstacles already hindering COVID-19 distribution.
