In theory you are right. Using national DCs to switch from push to oull would just work smoothly. I can only talk about Germany so, but I was in conctact with authorities last year regarding mask distribution. and what I saw back then was shocking. They had one logistics partner for import and central warehousing. i know that company, and they should have been able to organise ditribution as well, evne if for that part there would have been better companies. And everything up to the central warehouse worked justfine. Everything after that was a mess, they had million sof masks sittin in the warehouse while doctors, hospitals and everyone else had to make due with what they got themselves until their normal suppliers managed to supply them again. At which point nobody wanted (due to price) or needed the government sourced masks anymore.

The answer I got from the bavarian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Economics was, I paraphrase, "distribution is easy, we can handle that". 3 months later the same people said they underestimated distribution.

Ideally, I would say that vaccination centers should never run out of doses. So there should be more doses in these centers than appointments. Appointments is a mess, even for elderly and risk patients. One could also piggy back on the existing vaccine supply chains, using doctors practices. I am not aware of any plans to do so.

In case appointment management would work, one could allign these appointments with push deliveries from AZ and others. Manufacturers would have a forecast, push deliveries based on forecast would end up in the national hubs and supply of local centers would work using something like Knban loops. Easy, robust and scalable. Not that we will see any of this, or other solutions that would actually work, antime soon in Germany. So I expect it go down something like this:

1. manufacturer informs that a batch is available.

2. Bacth is delivered to central hub, in quite some cases tha hub cannot take the delivery resulting in a mess to get the doses at a later point

3. Once the doses are in the hub, authorities will (try) to reach out to eligible people that they can get vaccinations

4. two weeks after the batch is delivered, the first appointments will be available

5. Vaccination centers will not be able to vaccinate everyone with an appointment beause the supply with doses isn't working

6. Three weeks after the batch was delivered, it will partially be used

7. Repeat with the next batch

Joker: Political blame game and glory hunting, we have quite a lot of elections, including the federal one, this year. To be inserted at any point of the above chain, likely multiple times.