Stephen Flynn in News@Northeastern: Why is the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Failing – and How Can it be Fixed?
GRI Founding Director, Stephen Flynn, recently spoke with News@Northeastern to discuss the COVID-19 roll outs. “We need to draw on a reserve corps of people who can be trained, or retirees with skills who can be brought back into the system,” Dr. Flynn says. “This needs to be an all-hands-on-deck moment where we recruit and deploy all of the skilled labor forces we can find.”
In collaboration with Bouvé College of Health Sciences, GRI recently released a module, COVID-19: Vaccines 101, aimed to help individuals and communities make informed decisions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Read more about this here.
Excerpt:
The United States rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has been running far behind schedule, as only 4.5 million people have received an initial dose—15 million fewer inoculations than the federal government had promised by the end of 2020. At the current rate, the U.S. would need almost a decade to meet its goal of inoculating 80 percent of the population against the coronavirus.
The need for vaccines has never been more urgent. More than 20.4 million people in the U.S. have been infected, more than 350,000 have died, and caseloads continue to rise. “No major crisis in the last 100 years has been as badly managed by our national leaders as this pandemic,” says Stephen Flynn, founding director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute. “At every level, the systems that we have in place for dealing with this disaster and its consequences have been failing us.”