An ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will examine supply chain and distribution challenges related to vaccines and vaccinations during the COVID-19 response and explore their implications for pandemic and seasonal influenza.
Specifically, the committee will:
1) Review recommendations for pandemic vaccine manufacturing following SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and COVID-19 responses and assess where recommendations were not implemented and how they can be incorporated more sustainably for future influenza outbreaks;
2) Review promising tools, technical innovations and institutional processes to identify enabling factors for national vaccine distribution readiness that facilitate equitable distribution and efficient use of resources, including in low-resource countries (e.g., cold chain management, rapid regulatory prequalification procedures, liability and indemnification frameworks, and strengthening technical capacity of National Immunization Technical Advisory Groups);
3) Identify critical gaps in vaccine delivery, including inventory unpredictability and inadequate cold-chain capacity, and recommend priority actions at the regional and global levels to address them to create foundational delivery platforms for pandemic influenza;
4) Identify critical inputs for influenza vaccine manufacturing (e.g., adjuvants, needles, glass vials, lipids, etc.) and highlight existing mechanisms for tracking these inputs for ensuring sufficient and redundant production, storage, and availability in each region during global, large-scale vaccination efforts;
5) Identify how novel technologies and advances in translational research and science derived from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can be adapted to scale-up and sustain influenza vaccine manufacturing and distribution capacities, especially for multiple products;
6) Identify barriers impeding the rapid translation of clinical trial manufacturing supply for pandemic vaccines to commercial supply and recommend strategies to address these barriers. These may include lack of financing and limited knowledge of technology transfer;
7) Review incentives that effectively encourage investments in vaccine manufacturing, including those used during COVID-19 response, and recommend those that could be successfully applied to pandemic influenza vaccine manufacturing, especially actions and policies encouraging routine operations of facilities.