The Danger of Making Vaccinations an Elaborate Affair

The setup at one of the University of Tokyo's bigger conference halls is also designed for a major event. Hundreds of staff members checking paperwork, rows of chairs for people waiting their turn, and elaborate signs and partitions to direct the flow of traffic have turned the normally empty conference hall into one that serves a single purpose: an assembly line of getting as many COVID shots into people's arms as possible in a short time. The massive amount of human and physical resources, not to mention the planning, that went into the affair certainly displays the dedication of the university to its staff and students.

And for the most part, the operations are as smooth as they can get. The separate booths of people at desks checking off paperwork allow those getting jabs to get from the front door to the vaccination booth in mere minutes.  The jabs themselves take mere seconds as doctors administering the shots one after the other go about their work in almost robotic precision and efficiency. The 15-minute wait time after the jab, as stipulated by the Moderna vaccine makers, goes off without a hitch as staff members direct people to the post-vaccination wait rooms.

Still, one does wonder if all this elaborate setup is necessary. People around the world speak with envy about the ease of getting jabbed in the US, where shots are so abundant that one can simply walk into a nearby pharmacy without a reservation and get the process over with. In Japan, the waiting list for those wishing to get jabbed via government-allocated distributions is so long that those lucky enough to have non-government connections through their workplaces and schools are clearly jumping the queue. The University of Tokyo, among other institutions, serves their own, inadvertently increasing vaccine inequality.

Indeed, considering that the actual jab itself takes mere seconds to administer, it is a wonder that there is a need to get so many people into one location at once just to get the process going. The tightly packed waiting rooms, full of those getting jabbed and those running the show, make a mockery of the continuing need for social distancing as a way to prevent infections. Furthermore, given that all reservations are made online through a dedicated website, it is surprising to see just how many staff members are present to check off printed paperwork that they should already have electronic versions of.

If there is a need for so many staff members to man a vaccination venue, quickly providing them in more places will not be possible even if the supply of vaccines is abundant. Not every institution has the manpower and the space to run a massive vaccination operation. So many people, then, will be forced to wait not because of distribution problems with the vaccines, as is the case for many African countries, but a distribution problem with people, the majority completely unrelated to the act of jabbing arms itself, who are needed to make vaccine distribution happen.

This situation does not bode well for the growing trend of the world to live with a COVID that can no longer be eradicated and may require constant booster shots. Ramping up the production of vaccines is possible once more production facilities come online across the world. But given that human resources remain finite in the short term, the need to run a labor-intensive vaccination operation will prove to be expensive and unsustainable. The world living with COVID will need to come up with methods that automate the process of getting jabbed as much as possible.

Perhaps technology and changes in laws will resolve the issue over time. The ongoing development of orally administered vaccines may lead to a world in which fending off COVID would simply be about buying a few pills in the local pharmacy and swallowing them with some water at home. Perhaps, like the US, many countries will move toward allowing pharmacists, rather than just doctors, to administer vaccines, allowing the process of jabbing to be no more a short trip around the neighborhood rather than a longer one to a giant vaccination venue.

But until that day comes, governments around the world still need to think about how to make the process of getting jabbed as simple and quick as possible. Setting up smaller venues rather than a few large ones will help greatly, so will eliminating the need for excess paperwork and travel that are real hurdles for people who are just so willing to find excuses not to get jabbed. Thought this way, the massive vaccination venue at the University of Tokyo is not an impressive sight, but a sign of an operational process that lags behind, leaving many people unable to get jabbed even if they want to.