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A new report on factories in Malaysia that create products for Brooks Brothers, Levi’s, LL Bean and others examines the high prices workers pay for their jobs.

Finding a vaccine that works effectively and ensuring that the vaccine is mass distributed are two different challenges. Rapid manufacturing and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine will rank as one of the most challenging government initiatives ever undertaken. Lives—and a normal way of life—are at stake. But with aggressive planning, management, and funding, a strong and competent federal government has an opportunity to prove that it can be an extraordinary force for good in people’s lives.

Making a vaccine quickly is hard enough but distributing one worldwide offers a host of other variables, and conflicting forces may work against the effort: The infrastructure powering the global economy is scaling down for a protracted downturn just as pharmaceutical companies need to scale up for the biggest and most consequential product launch in modern history.

Japan is paying 87 companies to shift production back home or into Southeast Asia after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains and exposed an overreliance on Chinese manufacturing. While China’s economy is already recovering from the coronavirus shock, the pandemic threatens to dent its reputation as the “factory of the world” — at least in some industries.

It’s a moment of reckoning for global supply chains. But that doesn’t mean companies are flocking back to the United States.
There are good reasons for some companies to move out of China. Wages are rising, whittling away at one incentive to manufacture there. And deep fissures between the United States and China have opened in areas like security and technology, which could lead to more aggressive action by either side, regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. Still, more companies leaving China does not necessarily represent a win for American workers. Like La-Z-Boy, many companies that are moving some facilities out of China are relocating to countries where wages are even lower. While U.S. trade with China fell sharply last year, imports from Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico swelled. For many companies, making their supply chains more resilient has actually meant spreading out production around the world, not concentrating it in the United States. Purveyors of consumer products, fast food and automobiles continue to expand in China, which is home to a rapidly growing consumer market and the world’s greatest concentration of factories. Some firms have struggled to find factory space or skilled workers outside of China.

David Simchi-Levi discusses some of the environmental, research, and packaging concerns in supplying populations with a COVID-19 vaccine.

The pandemic has exposed one of the major weaknesses of many supply chains: the inability to react to sudden, large-scale disruptions. This lack of resiliency has been especially notable in the supply chains of the life sciences, health care, and food industries. The resulting turmoil has generated calls for companies that had offshored production to Asia (and China, in particular) to bring it back home. But this approach is no panacea. For one thing, given the huge size of the Chinese market, most global companies will need to keep a presence there to serve it. For another, since China is now a dominant, if not sole, source, for thousands of items, reducing dependence on it in many cases will take considerable investment and time.

Drug manufacturers face supply-chain weaknesses and sourcing issues as they ramp up complex production processes to meet global demand.
“Over the past two decades, manufacturers in many different industries have been shifting to a ‘lean’ manufacturing model that reduces the amount of raw materials and finished product they keep in stock. “This was successful in terms of reducing costs,” Simchi-Levi says. “But it increased exposure to risk.”

The unsung star of 21st-century logistics is the global food system. From field to fork, it accounts for 10% of world gdp and employs perhaps 1.5bn people. The global supply of food has nearly tripled since 1970, as the population has doubled to 7.7bn. At the same time, the number of people who have too little to eat has fallen from 36% of the population to 11%, and a bushel of maize or cut of beef costs less today than 50 years ago in real terms. Food exports have grown sixfold over the past 30 years; four-fifths of people live in part on calories produced in another country. This happens in spite of governments, not because of them. Although their role has declined, they still sometimes fix prices and control distribution.

Creating and implementing a stress test for companies in critical industries is possible. It would go a long way toward ensuring that the kind of shortages that have been occurring in the last few months don’t happen again.

Medicine is a system for delivering care and support; it’s also a system of information, quality control, and lab science. All need fixing. I spoke to David Simchi-Levi, an M.I.T. professor who studies supply-chain economics and how enterprises respond to disasters. “Cost is easy to measure,” he told me. “But resilience is much harder.” Simchi-Levi is particularly interested in two variables that could serve as metrics for resilience. The first is the “time to survive”; that is, how long can an enterprise endure when there’s a sudden shortage of some critical good? The second is the “time to recover”: how much time will it take to restore adequate supplies of some critical good? By quantifying each variable under different scenarios, a business can model its ability to recover from a disaster. He told me about floods in Thailand that shut down factories responsible for critical computer and automotive parts. Afterward, some companies expanded their supply lines to other parts of Asia. Having seen the fragility of a tight chain, those companies had now established a network with some spring in it. In the future, their “time to survive” would exceed the suppliers’ “time to recover.”

Startups across the nation and around the world are looking for ways to relieve shortages of much-needed personal protective equipment and sanitizers used to halt the spread of COVID-19.

The coronavirus outbreak sent Mercury into retrograde three months early at most grocery stores…except for Texas’s H-E-B.
On Twitter, customers enthuse that H-E-B “has the ’rona in check.” H-E-B shelves are well-stocked. Stores don’t have a Hunger Games atmosphere. H-E-B even has enough food in its warehouses to donate 500,000 meals to Texas food banks. How did H-E-B sidestep the initial chaos other chains faced? The short answer, per Texas Monthly: constant vigilance.

The pandemic inspired an innovative project to design and make a low-cost ventilator in weeks, not years. The hurry-up engineering feat relied on human networks; two in particular stand out. The original design came from a classroom project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, since upgraded the design in collaboration with outside groups. The other network is the government and business community of New York. The city government took on the role of a risk-taking venture investor, first with a $100,000 research grant and then a nearly $10 million agreement to buy 3,000 of the basic ventilators.

The toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. The toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.

A relatively small number of plants process much of the beef and pork in the United States, and some of them have closed because workers are getting sick. After decades of consolidation, there are about 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, processing billions of pounds of meat for food stores each year. But a relatively small number of them account for the vast majority of production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of slaughtering and processing in the United States.