Vaccine Access Optimization for the East African Community: Reusing Previous Proven Supply Chains

As the only network of operational processes designed to move vaccines from manufacturers to recipients, a vaccine supply chain (VSC) is as important as a vaccine in the global fight against unforeseen infectious diseases like pandemics. Existing studies on VSC optimization often develop solutions based on statistical associations to address simplified and generalized problems, such as vaccine stockout issues. Additionally, these studies often assume a functional vaccine supply network will be available or established in due time. In reality, socioeconomically disadvantaged regions face systemic limitations that hinder the establishment of such supply chain infrastructures, making the solutions impractical as tools for vaccine access improvement in these regions. This paper contributes to operations research studies that seek to balance scientific rigor and practical relevance of vaccine access solutions by suggesting alternative methods for studying real-world VSCs as a tool to ensure vaccine access security for the aforementioned regions. Specifically, this work leverages the units of value, from supply chain and operations management concepts, as empirical tools to capture the performance of previous VSCs in ensuring vaccine access. The study establishes a framework to quantifiably evaluate four previous VSCs for their ability to ensure vaccine access. The findings present the top-scoring previous VSC as the Goldstar model, the most suitable for the EAC to redeploy in future pandemics to sustainably mitigate vaccine access inequities. As such, the significance of this research study lies in the practicality of the proposed solution as a promising approach to improving vaccine access.