TIP OF THE NEEDLE
ORGANIZATION STATION
U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Deja Cole, medical technician with the 412th Operational Medical Squadron, 412th Air Base Wing, prepares her station in April by making a box to hold bandages at the state-led, federally supported Ford Field Community Vaccination Center in Detroit. (Photo by Airman 1st Class Nicholas Rupiper, Federal Vaccine Response)
safety syringes and needles, which feature an attached shield to reduce the risk of accidental injury to health care workers, would be critical to the nation’s COVID-19 vaccination strategy; a chal- lenge of providing a total of over 1 billion safety syringes, across nine contracts, over a 12-month period, with over 88 million planned to be delivered by the end of 2020.
Leading the $310 million effort to ensure that the needles and syringes would be available for the COVID-19 vaccine, was U.S. Army Maj. Andrea Mountney, deputy joint product manager for Chemical Defense Pharmaceuticals at JPM CBRN Medical. (See "Why Ask Why," on Page 48.) “Interagency coordination is criti- cal to successfully executing a mission of this scale with so many moving parts,” said Mountney. “JPM CBRN Medical has oper- ated in the joint space for years, so we were uniquely positioned to leverage those existing relationships and develop new ones. It was a natural extension of what we do every day.”
44
Mountney led the interagency assisted acquisition to procure and deliver more than 70 percent of the nation’s supply of syringes and safety needles to support the nationwide administration of the COVID-19 vaccine. Te national COVID-19 vaccination campaign represented an unprecedented public-private partner- ship in which development and fielding activities were conducted in parallel, to significantly truncate the schedule. Te compressed timeline for vaccine development, as well as additional pressures on an already taxed global medical supply chain, intensified the need for coordination across the government.
As part of the whole-of-government response, the team partici- pated in weekly interagency meetings among representatives from DOD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Secu- rity. Te meetings served as the primary platform to coordinate product shipment, to expedite international and domestic import
Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2022
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92
