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Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines prepared for shipment to the Pfizer Global Supply Kalamazoo manufacturing facility in Kalamazoo.
Photographer: Morry Gash / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Morry Gash / AFP / Getty Images
The former industrial town of Kalamazoo, Michigan has become a manufacturing hub for Covid-19 vaccines. This can help the region’s economy turn a corner after a few difficult years.
Ranked highest this year Bloomberg Brain Drain Index of population loss of top talent, Kalamazoo has struggled like the rest of the United States with the overwhelming jobs pandemic. But the city had some hope when Pfizer Inc.’s adjacent Portage plant recently became a key distribution point for the vaccine. The drug maker and its German partner BioNTech SE plan to deliver 200 million doses to the United States by July.
Yet the pandemic has hit Michigan hard. The payroll stood at $ 4 million in November, down 9.4% from a year earlier for one of the largest drops among states, the Labor Department data exposure. The slow return of auto plant closures in the spring, however, is now being helped by a slowing infection rate.
Meanwhile, places like Kalamazoo are likely to be aided by a pandemic-triggered exodus from big cities that is drawing more families to smaller communities.
“People are looking for less friction in their lives,” and the work-from-home trend illustrates that jobs can be performed effectively outside the office, according to Ross DeVol, CEO of Heartland Forward, an urban development institute.
Kalamazoo also sees the economic renaissance in an asset that cannot leave the city: the land. Local authorities are using land banks to acquire abandoned and distressed homes and commercial properties to pave the way for return to growth. The strategy is to “breathe and make long-term plans,” said Kelly Clarke, executive director of the Kalamazoo County Land Bank.
According to the Index, six of the ten US metropolitan areas that have lost the most brains in the past four years are in the industrial Midwest. Rounding out the top five after Kalamazoo are Decatur, Illinois; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Lima, Ohio and Elmira, New York.
The Brain Drain Index tracks the losses of talented workers over the four years to 2019, with graduate degrees, science and engineering degrees, and employment in white-collar industries. It also incorporates population shifts and inflation-adjusted salary changes for science, technology, engineering, or math – the so-called STEM disciplines.
Separately, the Bloomberg’s Brain Concentration Index, which measures business start-ups, employment and education in STEM, shows that the top-scoring metropolitan areas are showing remarkable traction. The top spots are science-driven Boulder, Colorado, followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California.
Ann Arbor, headquarters of the University of Michigan, is third. Like many college towns, it attracts and retains new technology companies, including a Google campus. The top three held the same ranking in 2016.
However, the rankings for four areas – Santa Fe, New Mexico; Manchester-Nashua, New Hampshire; Columbia, Missouri, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois – fell to double digits.
For the full Bloomberg Brain Drain Index 2020 dataset, click here.
For the full Bloomberg Brain Concentration Index 2020 dataset, click here.
– With the help of Alexandre Tanzi
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