Every cargo airline pitched in for ensuring the distribution of Covid vaccines across nations. While the vaccination programme is still highly skewed in favour of the rich nations, efforts are being made to address the shortcomings. Martin Drew, Senior Vice President, Sales & Cargo, Etihad, spoke to Jyothi Shankaran about the challenges - out of over 22 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses/treatments to be manufactured every year until 2024, between 40-50 percent of these volumes do require air lift. Edited excerpts from an interview:
What are the key learnings on vaccine distribution during the pandemic?
Two of the key lessons learnt from this pandemic are: first that the world is big and small at the same time. In a sense, we are small in terms of connectedness where it took a contagion to travel the majority of our world irrespective of borders and kilometres within two months. Hence, no one will be able to say they are safe until everyone is safe.
The second lesson is that to achieve effective response to this pandemic, and especially from a supply chain point of view, collaboration is key. Collaboration needs to transcend public and private or national and international labels; processes need to be designed according to needs and not according to existing boundaries of specific steps of ownership. This needs to be done in the spirit that getting what is needed to where it is needed in the most reliable way is now literally becoming a life-and-death matter.
0 comments:
Post a Comment