Swine flu pandemic

On my travels today I had the car radio on listening to various people from the medical profession talk about the possibility of this swine flu becoming a pandemic. One of the points raised was getting the necessary quantities of the vaccine to the world's populace. If the drug and vaccine institutes in the developed countries worked day and night it would be something like 3 years before they could roll out enough medication. Supply chaining it's called. Now the link. Thomas Friedman in his The World is Flat stated that supply chaining was one of the 10 things that helped flatten the world.
So what's supply chaining..... Check wikipedia definitions one and two when you purchase an item, eg a tv or a tub of ice cream the scanner records that the item has been sold, and notifies the warehouse, who then in turn replaces that item, which is a good way of not having excess stock, not producing more than the demand etc. Supermarkets, and Noel Lemming do this really effectively. But if there aren't any on the shelf to start with eg drugs, then its going to be difficult to supply chain the whole world. On one hand supply chaining flattened the world, by having a flat world and the accessibility to transport, technology etc has in this instance potentially caused us problems. It's a chicken and egg scenerio.