The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world to its core and caused a wave of lockdowns from 2020, as the world attempted to get to grips with the deadly disease.
The race to invent and bring a vaccine to market would help signal the end of the deadly destruction and chaos wrought by the disease and that day came early in 2021.
The speed at which global economies could respond to the need for a large-scale vaccination rollout would define how quickly a country could return to something approaching normality. The global vaccination programme caused unprecedented supply chain shocks for businesses, as they fought to meet demand.
The demand was successfully met, with over 12.7 billion doses of the vaccine being administered across 184 countries by the end of 2022. One of the companies that played a key role in the vaccine rollout was Sol-Millennium. The company’s response to the demand for medical products proved the making of them, with the delivery of over 2 billion low dead space syringes and needles helping to meet the extreme and unprecedented demand.
“The vaccination campaign challenge is a good example of our competencies. It was a supply chain challenge, it was a production challenge and we had to multiply our production capacity many times,” said Sol-Millennium Senior Marketing Director, Giulio Falconi.
In a matter of months, Sol-Millennium’s production capabilities increased almost 10 times. It was achieved in tandem with modified product configurations that would help reduce the amount of vaccine waste, ensuring that hundreds of millions of doses were saved globally.
The product configuration was made possible thanks to a desire to push existing designs and reimagine what is possible. It’s an attitude that enabled the company to meet local clinical practice needs. The ability to prevent needle stick injuries and syringe reuse were important during the vaccine rollout and will continue to be just as helpful in the years to come with the vaccination programme far from complete. There remains a significant number of developing countries where a relative fraction of the population are vaccinated against the disease.
Sol-Millennium’s vision is to become one of the best and most innovative medical device companies in the world. It is an aim perfectly displayed in their membership of ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. Membership of the organisation means Sol-Millennium are recognised as technical experts in their field. Since becoming a member, they have initiated an improvement in existing device standards that would improve the worldwide industry segment moving forward, commented Dario de Zolt, Vice President Global R&D.
With the future in mind, the company is determined to help build a healthier tomorrow and will be able to partly achieve that through helping to better prepare the global community for the possibility of another major health event. The company will work with professional health providers as well as consumers, citizens and patients to advise on how they can prepare in a more timely fashion.
