Securing Vaccine Supply: Implications for research, policy, and practice

COVID-19 vaccines have been fundamental to recovering from the pandemic and having some normalcy after the social, political, and economic havoc caused by the novel coronavirus. In this paper, we examine the process of securing vaccine supplies in four European countries to respond to the new variants of Covid-19. In this paper, we follow a qualitative approach. We collected data through a literature survey and semi-structured interviews with the people in these countries responsible for prepositioning vaccines, supplier management, and designing framework contracts with vaccine manufacturers. Our findings reveal that though vaccine purchases in European Union (EU) followed a joint procurement, member states have directly ordered the vaccine manufacturers. As a result, vaccine-securing strategies varied among EU countries. The findings also suggest that innovativeness and responsiveness were key strategies used by the studied countries. A resultant policy implication is a dire need to design innovative policies to secure emergency medical supplies such as a vaccine. The implication for practice is that even though the countries studied here are rich countries with significant purchase power, less developed nations can also exercise these innovative means of securing vaccine supplies.