Chad P. Bown (PIIE) and Thomas J. Bollyky (Council on Foreign Relations)
wp21-12ABSTRACT
Many months after COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized for public use,
still limited supplies could only partially reduce the devastating loss of life
and economic costs caused by the pandemic. Could additional vaccine doses
have been manufactured more quickly some other way? Would alternative
policy choices have made a difference? This paper provides a simple analytical
framework through which to view the contours of the vaccine value chain. It then
creates a new database that maps the COVID-19 vaccines of Pfizer/BioNTech,
Moderna, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and CureVac to
the product- and location-specific manufacturing supply chains that emerged in
2020 and 2021. It describes the choppy process through which dozens of other
companies at nearly 100 geographically distributed facilities came together to
scale up global manufacturing. The paper catalogues major pandemic policy
initiatives—such as the United States’ Operation Warp Speed—that are likely to
have affected the timing and formation of those vaccine supply chains. Given the
data, a final section identifies further questions for researchers and policymakers.