US pharmaceutical supply chain unprepared for COVID-19

In this guest editorial, Pinar Keskinocak, PhD, director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Evren Ozkaya, PhD, founder and CEO of the management consulting and digital solutions firm Supply Chain Wizard, discuss how pandemics create chaos in global medical supply chains and ways to alleviate this burden. Pandemics encumber the supply of medications needed to fight them and also the supply of other critical pharmaceuticals with potentially grave consequences for public health. Pandemics do this by disrupting global supply chains in general, and pharmaceutical supply chains are particularly vulnerable. America’s medical supply chain is not prepared for this. But government and industry can help it cope if they react rapidly.