This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Jean-Cedric Meeus, the Chief of Global Transport at UNICEF. UNICEF plays a KEY role in ensuring that low income countries get access to vaccines and medicines. This is something they’ve been doing for decades and are one of the biggest buyers of vaccines globally. Today, we will be talking about various things include what challenges COVID posed when the lockdowns first kicked off, what are the challenges in purchasing and procuring vaccines given that they’re having to compete directly with governments around the w ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Derek Wallace. Derek is the VP and Global Dengue Program head at Takeda. Derek has been at Takeda since 2013, but has over 16 years of experience in clinical development, infectious diseases and medical affairs from working at Merck, Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur. 

Takeda is on the cusp of having a vaccine for dengue approved - and today we talk about how dengue affects the world, which regions get most hit, what the impact of the vaccine will be in alleviating the threat it presents, what happens behind the scenes t ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Jaimie Shaffs. Jamie Shaffs is the Chief Data Scientist of the New York department of Health and Mental Hygiene as well as a member of the COVID-19 Emergency Response Task Force.  Jaimie has assisted various emergency responses in India, Africa prior to this for health and refugee crisis. Jaimie is an epidemiologist and is pursuing a PhD in Health Equity and Social Justice at Johns Hopkins. In this podcast Jaimie answers how her department reacted to all of the challenges as they were developing, the role that ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Niels van Namen. Niels van Namen is an experienced Healthcare supply chain professional, entrepreneur and TED speaker. Niels is passionate about Patient Centric supply chains, improving patient outcomes and making Healthcare affordable and accessible for everyone.  Niels currently leads the global CEVA Healthcare team as the Executive Vice President for the Healthcare Sector.  With the pandemic fueling telehealth and other home care, I sat with Niels to chat about how the future of healthcare that he had e ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Bill Keough. Bill Keough is the Director of the Institute for Supply Chain Development (ISCD), which provides leading-edge supply chain training for health professionals working in low-resource environments. ISCD combines online technologies and platforms with a unique pedagogical approach specifically designed to deliver quantifiable student learning outcomes. ISCD has completed projects for clients including UNICEF, VillageReach, USAID, the Africa Resource Centre, People that Deliver, GAVI, and others. We asked Bi ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Craig Fuller, Founder & CEO, FreightWaves. FreightWaves is the leading publication in freight and brings data and analytics to the global $9.6tn industry. Where there was so much speculation about how difficult the logistics was going to be for vaccine distribution, we asked Craig to validate if that was true and what are the actual bottlenecks in distribution from his perspective.  We also asked Craig to give us a lowdown of how things played out in the freight market when lockdowns first started happening ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Peter Marks, Director, Director Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Food & Drugs Administration. We’ve asked Peter some really important questions around how FDA has been giving vaccine approval at record speed, why the embargo on vaccine raw materials to rest of the world, their relationship with other regulatory bodies, and whether there will be permanent changes in how the FDA functions, development and approval timelines given the speed at which these vaccines have come to market. If you want to he ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Carlo de Notaristefani, Lead Advisor Manufacturing & Supply Chain at Operation Warp Speed. Operation Warp Speed is a public–private partnership initiated by the US government to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. We’ve asked Carlo some really important questions around how OWS works with the FDA and CDC, what are the actual number of vaccines in the pipeline waiting to be authorized, how many Americans have already been inoculated, why the embargo on ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Adarsh Kumar, CEO of TagBox.  TagBox helps support track & trace for critical supply chains through the use of IoT sensing. The sensors they use have been developed in-house and are merely the size of a matchbox. They claim it offers a better substitute to the age-old data logging system by enabling real-time tracking and other crucial metrics.  Due to the pandemic, they’ve seen surprising use cases for these little guys – such as contact tracing amongst individuals working in crowded or closed spaces ..read more

This episode of The Vaccine Challenge is hosted by Priyanka Asera and features Craig Fuller, Founder & CEO, FreightWaves. FreightWaves is the leading publication in freight and brings data and analytics to the global $9.6tn industry. Where there was so much speculation about how difficult the logistics was going to be for vaccine distribution, we asked Craig to validate if that was true and what are the actual bottlenecks in distribution from his perspective.  We also asked Craig to give us a lowdown of how things played out in the freight market when lockdowns first started happening ..read more