Julian Agostini, MD at EW publisher Mash Media, says that the events industry has the right skillset to help deliver the vaccination logistics.
With a month to go, we have now entered the season of chocolates without conscience, mulled wine and films that you have seen a thousand times, which require little cerebral involvement.
I might have been drawn into one such film the other evening, namely Big with Tom Hanks. Normally the story would play out mindlessly, but my family found itself in a discussion around one of the sub-themes, i.e. would it make sense for a child to be consultant at a toy firm? They, after all, are the end users: the experts.
This led to further chat as to why humans are the chief tasters for dog and cat food. We even got to suggesting that cat food should surely be predominantly mouse flavoured or in fact just mice (could be a brand in the making?).
The point is that everybody should do what they are good at, and that would make the world a more efficient place. It is a simple principle to get everybody in the right position so that teams function at their best. How often does that actually happen, I wonder?
Yesterday I was talking to my cousin, who also runs a business in the events industry (Ashley Coker of Coker Expo) and he was making exactly this point but for something far more serious: the vaccine.
As he succinctly put it, and in my view correctly, the task of vaccinating most of the population as quickly as we can over the next few months is, in effect, a colossal event. The biggest event in years, probably since the Olympics, and given that we have got nothing else to do at the moment, who better to run this operation than the events industry?
It is a serious and very sensible suggestion.
To get this operation completed in the most efficient way, why would you not employ the experts in this field? Think about what this entails.
The current thinking is that there will be localised units dotted all over the country. These will require the following:
- A venue
- Crowd control
- Visitor registration
- Information for visitors
- Visitor flow both pre and post vaccination
- Tight scheduling and plan B, C, D etc. for when this goes awry
- Logistics
I could go on, but is this all sounding familiar? Moreover, it is will require professionals who don’t panic when people are getting anxious all around them. Many of the public will be stressed throughout this process which means operations may often not go according to plan.
The events industry deals with these types of problems all day, every day. We are the experts and there is no-one better placed to serve the country to get this job done.
So, what I am saying is that, yet again, we should be going to the press and Government, which routinely blank us and tell them this time they ignore us at their peril.
Give us the job and the country will be back on its feet quickly and you also might finally understand our incredible skill and value.
Let us do what we are good at so that everyone can sleep easy, be they in Seattle or anywhere else in the world.
