Syringes must be prioritized globally to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 and other essential vaccines and to sustain safe injection practices

ABSTRACT

Supply of autodisable (AD) syringes has been a key component of global COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, and it is critical to maintaining safe injection practices for routine immunization as well as pandemic response. AD syringe production increased significantly in response to demand, but distribution challenges have included the need to coordinate syringes to meet the specific delivery requirements of various COVID-19 vaccines, shipping bottlenecks, and syringe export restrictions. Stockpiling syringes, ensuring standardization of future vaccine dose volumes, and geographical diversification of syringe production would improve syringe logistics in the future. Balancing syringe supply and demand and stabilizing the market over the long term is essential to ensure that the world is prepared for possible new variants of COVID-19 or a new global outbreak. This will require concerted action on the part of public, nonprofit, and private partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccine
• syringe
• COVID-19
• injection safety
• supply, autodisable AD
• pandemic
• supply logistics
• health technologies
• manufacturing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [INV-029679]. Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission.