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The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of pharmacist involvement as vaccine providers in the USA and discuss examples of growing interests in other parts of the world.

Literature searches were performed in PubMed as well as pharmacy-related journals.

Pharmacists have been involved with the storage and management of vaccines for more than a century. Based on the unmet needs in meeting national goals for vaccination rates among adults in the USA, efforts led to training and recognizing pharmacists as vaccine providers which is now within the scope of practice for a pharmacist in all US states and territories. Pharmacists complete a comprehensive training program in vaccine sciences, regulatory considerations, as well as demonstration of skills in administering vaccines. Over 300,000 pharmacists have been trained in vaccine delivery and this represents the majority of the pharmacist workforce in the USA. There are examples of the beneficial impact of pharmacist involvement as vaccine providers in community pharmacy settings.

This review is based on a thorough review of the literature but was not conducted in a systematic fashion.

This review provides a historical perspective and evidence of the benefit of pharmacists as vaccine providers.

Due to the introduction of new vaccines in the child immunization program and inefficient vaccine supply chain (VSC), the universal immunization program (UIP), India is struggling to provide a full schedule of vaccination to the targeted children. In this paper, the authors investigate the critical factors for improving the performance of the existing VSC system by implementing the next-generation vaccine supply chain (NGVSC) in India.

The authors design a fuzzy multi-criteria framework using a fuzzy analytical hierarchical process (FAHP) and fuzzy multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (FMOORA) to identify and analyze the critical barriers and enablers for the implementation of NGVSC. Further, the authors carry out a numerical simulation to validate the model.

The outcome of the analysis contends that demand forecasting is the topmost supply chain barrier and sustainable financing is the most important/critical enabler to facilitate the implementation of the NGVSC. In addition, the simulation reveals that the results of the study are reliable.

The findings of the study can be useful for the child immunization policymakers of India and other developing countries to design appropriate strategies for improving existing VSC performance by implementing the NGVSC.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first empirical study to propose the improvement of VSC performance by designing the NGVSC.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to consider how to reach vulnerable communities with extended outreach services to improve vaccination uptake. The authors created an optimization model to align with decision-makers' objective to maximize immunization coverage within constrained budgets and deploy resources considering empirical data and endogenous demand.

A mixed integer program (MIP) determines the location of outreach sites and the resource deployment across health centers and outreach sites. The authors validated the model and evaluated the approach in consultation with UNICEF using a case study from The Gambia.

Results in The Gambia showed that by opening new outreach sites and optimizing resource allocation and scheduling, the Ministry of Health could increase immunization coverage from 91.0 to 97.1% under the same budget. Case study solutions informed managerial insights to drive gains in vaccine coverage even without the application of sophisticated tools.

The research extended resource constrained LMIC vaccine distribution modeling literature in two ways: first, endogenous calculation of demand as a function of distance to health facility location enabled the effective design of the vaccine network around convenience to the community and second, the model's resource bundle concept more accurately and flexibly represented complex requirements and costs for specific resources, which facilitated buy-in from stakeholders responsible for managing health budgets. The paper also demonstrated how to leverage empirical research and spatial analysis of publicly available demographic and geographic data to effectively represent important contextual factors.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how access to vaccination for older people in the UK can be both improved and used as a tool for healthy ageing.

ILC-UK released a report “Adult Immunisation in the UK”, which applied a UK perspective to a 2013 Supporting Active Ageing Through Immunisation (SAATI) report on immunisation. The ILC report combined the SAATI findings with a traditional literature review, a policy review incorporating grey literature and the outcomes of a focus group discussion. This paper highlights the key findings of the ILC-UK report.

Vaccination needs to be included as part of proactive strategies to promote healthy and active ageing. Initiatives need to be explored that increase the rate of delivery of vaccinations. Barriers to the vaccination of health and social care professionals working with older people need to be removed. The government should explore using psychological insights into human behaviour to improve the take-up of vaccinations amongst adults. The range of settings where older people can receive vaccination needs to be expanded. Information on the potential benefits of immunisation should be made readily available and easily accessible to older people.

The paper calls for a structural shift in how vaccination services in the UK are organised.

The paper calls for a cultural shift in how society views immunisation and the role it has to play in the healthy ageing process.

The paper uses new European research on immunisation and applies it to the UK's situation.

During 1983, an extended (or outreach) immunisation programme was carried out in rural Jamaica. The resources used were recorded, and accurate costings for the programme calculated. The results demonstrated significant economies of scale, ie as numbers increased between the different phases of the programme, cost per unit immunisation decreased.

This paper highlights defects in the UK measles control programme, and identifies possible reasons for this. The consequences of continuing low uptake rates are predicted on the basis of modelling theory. Proposals that could be implemented by district and regional health authorities are made.

The already-strained vaccine supply chain (VSC) of the expanded program for immunization (EPI) require a more robust and structured distribution network for pandemic/outbreak vaccination due to huge volume demand and time constraint. In this paper, a lean-agile-green (LAG) practices approach is proposed to improve the operational, economic and environmental efficiency of the VSC.

A fuzzy decision framework of importance performance analysis (IPA)–analytical hierarchy process (AHP)–technique for order for preference by similarity in ideal solution (TOPSIS) has been presented in this paper to prioritize the LAG practices on the basis of the influence on performance indicators. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to check the robustness of the presented model.

The derived result indicates that sustainable packaging, coordination among supply chain stakeholders and cold chain technology improvement are among the top practices affecting most of the performance parameters of VSC. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the priority of practices is highly dependent on the weightage of performance indicators.

This study's finding will help policymakers reframe strategies for sustainable VSC (SVSC) by including new management practices that can handle regular immunization programs as well as emergency mass vaccination.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that proposes the LAG framework for SVSC. The IPA–Fuzzy AHP (FAHP)–Fuzyy TOPSIS (FTOPSIS) is also a novel combination in decision-making.

Facility-based Varicella zoster virus (VZV) transmission is reported in a Canadian youth offender correctional centre (YOCC). Transmission occurred from an immunocompetent youth offender (YO) with localized Herpes zoster to another immunocompetent single dose vaccinated YO, resulting in Varicella zoster (VZ) breakthrough disease. The purpose of this paper is to identify infection prevention and control (IPAC) measures utilized in this setting.

A retrospective chart and immunization record review was conducted for two VZV cases and 27 exposed YO contacts in order to obtain demographic, clinical and immunization data. Descriptive data analysis was performed.

All VZV cases and exposed contacts were male with an average age of 14.2 and 15.6 years for cases and contacts, respectively. Both cases shared the same living unit in the YOCC. There were 28 identified YO contacts, of whom 70 percent were single dose vaccinated with univalent vaccine, followed by 22 percent with a previous history of Varicella disease. All cases and contacts were born in Canada. No foreign-born populations were involved with this event. Infection control measures included additional precaution management, enhanced surveillance and environmental cleaning. As such, no hospitalizations or post-exposure immunizations were required.

This report highlights the role that VZ breakthrough disease could play in fueling an outbreak in a high-risk environment without rapid recognition and implementation of preventative measures. It also underscores the importance of IPAC presence and public health immunization programs within correctional centers to avoid infectious disease threats.

The increasing prevalence of a wide range of infectious diseases, as well as the underwhelming results of vaccination rates that may be traced back to problems with vaccine procurement and distribution, have brought to the fore the importance of vaccine supply chain (VSC) management in recent years. VSC is the cornerstone of effective vaccination; hence, it is crucial to enhance its performance, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where immunization rates are not satisfactory.

In this paper, the authors focus on VSC performance improvement of India by proposing supply contracts under demand uncertainty. The authors propose three contracts – wholesale price (WSP), cost sharing (CS) and incentive mechanism (IM) for the government-operated immunization program of India.

The authors' findings indicate that IM is capable of coordinating the supply chain, whereas the other two contracts are inefficient for the government. To validate the model, it is applied to a real-world scenario of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in India, and the findings show that an IM contract improves the overall efficiency of the system by 23.72%.

Previous studies focused mainly on the influenza VSC industry within developed nations. Nonetheless, there exists a dearth of literature pertaining to the examination of supply contracts and their feasibility for immunization programs that are administered by the government and aimed at optimizing societal benefits. The authors' findings can be beneficial to the immunization program of India to optimize their VSC cost.

The purpose of this paper is to find the impact of food price volatility on child health and education attainment in urban areas of Pakistan. This research also compares the two variables among the two time periods: the period of low volatile food prices (2014‒2015) and the period of high volatile food prices (2013‒2014). The rate of child immunization and the rate of child school attendance are used as proxies for child health and child education, respectively.

This study employs propensity score matching (PSM) technique introduced by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983), to overcome the selection bias problem in the observational studies.

The closing part of the paper concludes that both the rate of child immunization and the rate of child school attendance are significantly poorer for the households of Pakistan in the control period (of high food price volatility) as compared to the treated period (of low food price volatility). After controlling the problem of selection bias through PSM technique, it is found that there is a further increase in the rate of child immunization and the rate of child school attendance. It proves that the data were biased before applying the matching technique.

This study lengthens the literature by identifying the impact of food price volatility on child health and education of urban households of Pakistan, using high frequency data of PSLM/HIES, with the help of semi-parametric technique of matching. This type of micro-level research has not been conducted (nationally or internationally) so far; therefore, it would possibly open a sphere for policy makers to implement the suitable policies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2019-0275.