A Shot in the Arm
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23 February 2022 - Scandinavia
On the bumpy Widerøe flight across Scandinavia from Helsinki to Bergen I finished reading Yossi Sheffi's excellent A Shot in the Arm: How Science, Engineering, and Supply Chains Converged to Vaccinate the World. Sheffi is a professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, so the book was detailed as well as succinct. It explained the science in layman's terms and outlined the specifics of Moderna and BioNTech's approaches to creating mRNA vaccines. The really incredible part of the vaccine rollout was the simultaneous development of the supply while the vaccines were in development. This is were Sheffi really shines and it's obvious logistics is his backyard. Then he goes on to the social problem of deploying the vaccine to the public, spending no small amount of time skewering the failures of the Trump and Biden administrations. If there is a hole in the book it's that the global focus beyond that follows Sheffi's own personal interest, namely Israel, about which he writes alot while writing little about the rollout in Europe, Asia, or Africa beyond some shots at their politicians' geopolitical aims. Sheffi is also a tecchnocrat who believes that public health is more important than personal freedom, but doesn't ignore the latter in detailing people's motivations. I would strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to do a deep dive into recent history that has affected us all.
