The authorization granted to Moderna's vaccine highlights the role of Operation Warp Speed set up by Washington to accelerate the quest for drugs and vaccines against Covid-19. With an "American-style" method: innovation, a lot of money, soldiers and a dose of marketing.
In this post, we focus on the logistical challenges associated with distributing different types of COVID-19 vaccines to millions of people, from urban centers to sparsely populated rural counties. To address those questions, we spoke with Julie Swann, a systems engineer with expertise in vaccine distribution whose work focuses on making health care and supply chains more efficient, effective and equitable. Swann is the department head and A. Doug Allison Distinguished Professor of the Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State.
When the first doses of a COVID-19 from Pfizer and BioNTech were administered across the United States on Monday, it marked the beginning of a mass distribution effor that hinges on an unlikely product: dry ice.
Several thousand doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine were quarantined in California and Alabama after the US authorities encountered a transit anomaly that caused the storage temperature to get too cold. According to Gen. Gustave Perna, the one overseeing the logistics for Operation Warp Speed, the doses never left the truck, but they have to ensure that this anomaly is safe.
Sheldon H. Jacobson doesn’t mince words about the lack of a coordinated effort to collect reliable data about COVID. “Data collection has been a disaster during this pandemic,” says Jacobson, a Founder Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois and a leader at INFORMS, an association for operations research and analytics professionals. “For someone who uses data and analyzes data, it took me months to get info from the CDC.”
Ashley Smith
Public Affairs Coordinator
INFORMS
Catonsville, MD
[email protected]
443-757-3578
An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.
Can we really trust AI to make better decisions than humans? A new study says … not always. Researchers have discovered that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, one of the most advanced and popular AI models, makes the same kinds of decision-making mistakes as humans in some situations—showing biases like overconfidence of hot-hand (gambler’s) fallacy—yet acting inhuman in others (e.g., not suffering from base-rate neglect or sunk cost fallacies).
The genetic testing company 23andMe, which holds the genetic data of 15 million people, declared bankruptcy on Sunday night after years of financial struggles. This means that all of the extremely personal user data could be up for sale—and that vast trove of genetic data could draw interest from AI companies looking to train their data sets, experts say.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the new secretary of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s de facto healthcare czar. He will have influence over numerous highly visible agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, among others. Given that healthcare is something that touches everyone’s life, his footprint of influence will be expansive.
Health insurance has become necessary, with large and unpredictable health care costs always looming before each of us. Unfortunately, the majority of people have experienced problems when using their health insurance to pay for their medical care. Health insurance serves as the buffer between patients and the medical care system, using population pooling to mitigate the risk exposure on any one individual.
During this podcast Handfield addressed various topics, including: the current state of the supply chain; steps and actions shippers should consider related to tariffs; how the supply chain is viewed; the need for supply chain resiliency; and supply chain risk mangement planning, among others.
Oklahoma State University's Sunderesh Heragu joins LiveNOW's Austin Westfall to discuss the evolving economic landscape after President Trump implemented tariffs on some of our biggest trade partners. Most tariffs have been halted for now -- but not with China. Beijing and the White House have levied steep tariffs on each other. Trump announced that tariffs on China would reach 145 percent. In response, China imposed 125 percent tariffs on U.S.-imported goods.
Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change.
In the case of upgrading electrical and broadband infrastructure, new analysis from the University of Massachusetts Amherst reveals {that a} “dig once” strategy is almost 40% more economical than changing them individually.