Corporations offer to help with vaccine rollout
Corporations offer to help with vaccine rollout
The Donald Trump administration left the vaccine rollout, for the most part, to state and local governments. So right now, “it’s literally the Wild West,” said Anna Nagurney, professor of operations management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“You need better coordination, better communication and emphasizing operational efficiency,” Nagurney said. “And we know how to do that.”
By “we,” she meant American companies.
To end the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government needs hundreds of millions of Americans to get vaccinated. And one of the hardest parts of rolling out the vaccine is the so-called last mile. In e-commerce, that’s the final step — the stuff that happens just before a package gets delivered to your door. In the vaccine realm, it’s the part just before the needle plunges into your arm.
The logistics are incredibly difficult. And big companies are offering to help.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, Honeywell is helping the government host big vaccination events.
The company is contributing its technology, like bar-code scanning to help patients check in faster, said Taylor Smith, chief marketing officer for Honeywell Productivity Solutions and Services.
Also, “we’re deploying some of our camera-based, kind of vision analytics to look at the flow of cars that are coming through to these drive-thru clinics to identify where bottlenecks are,” he said.
Another example: Starbucks. It’s good at moving customers through its stores quickly and keeping track of their orders, so it’s working with Washington state on the people-processing part of the vaccine rollout.
There’s also the location problem: We need vaccination sites where there’s room for people to socially distance.
Enter Disneyland in Southern California as well as sports venues like Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park in Massachusetts and both major baseball stadiums in New York City.
Meanwhile, Walmart is offering more of its stores as vaccination sites, and Amazon just sent the administration of Joe Biden a letter saying it can help, too.
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