How South Korea turbocharged specialty syringe production for COVID-19 vaccines

An employee works at a low dead space (LDS) syringe factory in Gunsan, South Korea, April 5, 2021. REUTERS/Heo Ran

SEOUL (Reuters) - It was 7:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve when Cha Jung-hoon, South Korea's deputy minister for small businesses, got a call from his boss to make an urgent three-hour car trip to visit syringe maker Poonglim Pharmatech.

The brief: work out how the government could convince and aid Poonglim, which had only about 80 employees, to rapidly scale up production of their low dead space (LDS) syringes, a type of syringe designed to minimise the amount of a drug left in the device after injection.