Covid-19 vaccine delivery faces problems, warns DHL Two-thirds of the world unlikely to have easy ac6 Sep 2020 08:56
Covid-19 vaccine delivery faces problems, warns DHL
Two-thirds of the world unlikely to have easy access to vaccines requiring frozen storage
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Two-thirds of the world’s population are unlikely to have easy access to any Covid-19 vaccine that needs to be stored at freezing temperatures, the German logistics giant Deutsche Post DHL has warned.
Research by DHL and consultancy firm McKinsey has found that insufficient “last mile” cooling facilities in the final delivery stages and a lack of storage at clinics in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America would “pose the biggest challenge” to delivering a vaccine at scale.
Existing “cold-chain” infrastructure, which allows for temperatures to be controlled throughout the delivery process, is only sufficient to bring a frozen vaccine to 2.5bn people in approximately 25 developed countries, the paper concluded.
“Governments and [non governmental organisations] would need to implement special measures to ensure vaccine distribution” such as rapidly building storage capacity, the authors wrote.
“We can bring the stuff there?.?.?.?but in the end, when we have delivered it to the doctor, what happens once they open the package?” Katja Busch, DHL’s chief commercial officer, told the Financial Times. She added that the company was already in discussions with “some of the bigger governments” about solving such problems.
More than 170 Covid-19 vaccines are currently in development, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 30 of those have already proceeded to clinical trials.
A wide variety of models are being tried, but one in particular, which uses mRNA molecules, is likely to require freezing or very cold storage during transportation, the report said. Moderna and a partnership between BioNTech and Pfizer are developing mRNA vaccines.
However, distribution is likely to become easier as more knowledge is discovered about how a particular vaccine survives.
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