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In Kalamazoo, Michigan, millions of vials of a covid-19 vaccine may soon be rolling off production lines. There are still many hurdles to leap before that vaccine – the candidate from US drug company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech – or any other is approved and distributed, but governments, manufacturers and shipping firms around the world have already spent months preparing for what happens next.

The most recent McKinsey Global Survey on AI shows a 25% increase in use by companies over the prior year, a trend that shows no signs of slowing. At this pace, have we entered the Age of AI? Do we even need supply chain planners, or can we turn out the lights and go home, because we now live in a world of autonomous planning? The short answer is that planners are more important than ever, and not just because the hype may be ahead of the curve.

We all thought we knew what kinds of places to avoid: the ballparks, the Sunday services, the packed train cars. If we didn’t want to catch COVID-19, we should stay away from crowds. That was the mantra. So we skipped the summer street parties and we did virtual church. We had a nice little evening at home, ordering takeout and maybe inviting our closest friends and family over.

A study on Medicaid-enrolled children with asthma found that implementing several widely available interventions could reduce health care expenditures and utilization of hospital services, according to the results published in Journal of Asthma. "This work shows that you can improve the quality of life for children with asthma and you can reduce government spending by implementing these proactive interventions," said Julie Swann, PhD, MS, lead author of the study and head of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University, in a statement.

Two drug companies have now reported highly successful results from phase III trials of COVID-19 vaccines. On November 18 Pfizer and partner BioNTech said their vaccine was 95 percent effective at preventing the disease, based on full trial results. Two days earlier Moderna reported its vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, based on interim data.