Storage shortage may deny billions of COVID-19 vaccine

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Roughly three billion people may not get a COVID-19 vaccine because several regions lack the required cold storage facilities, the Associated Press reported.
•  While most vaccines need to be stored between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccine candidates need temperatures of minus 15 and minus 70 Celsius respectively.
• Parts of Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and most of Africa are badly in need of cold storage facilities.

Billions of people may not have access to a COVID-19 vaccine when it is ready because of a shortage of effective cold storage facilities. 

Generally, vaccines require storage temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. But because most of the vaccine candidates which are currently in the final stages of clinical trials are RNA vaccines, extremely cold temperatures are needed. 

Trial vaccines from Moderna are stored at minus 15 degrees Celsius while Pfizer requires its vaccine to be kept at minus 70 degrees Celsius. 

Such rigid temperatures could mean that several countries would be unable to immunize their entire population due to having insufficient clinical refrigerators, the Associated Press reported. These countries include parts of Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and “all but a tiny corner of Africa”. 

Dr. Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi, a pathologist in Venezuela, told the AP that his country’s infrastructure may be inadequate for the vaccine to be safely delivered to the rural areas. 

“I’m not optimistic on how the vaccine would be distributed in the inner states because there is no infrastructure of any kind to guarantee delivery — or if it gets delivered, guarantees the adequate preservation under cold conditions,” he said. 

Issa Ouedraogo, the national vaccination director of Burkina Faso also told the AP that only 40% of the country’s health centers have dependable fridges thus needing about 1,000 more to store the vaccines. 

India has also expressed their concern about being unable to safely store enough doses for its 1.3 billion citizens.

Satyajit Rath of the National Institute of Immunology (NII) told the Press Trust of India that the “extremely stringent cold chains” is immensely challenging for the country to implement. 

In addition, Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts Amherst noted in an article in The Conversation that the current vaccine cold chain may not up to the task of distributing around 6.4 billion flu vaccines a year, adding that expanding the supply chain isn’t going to be easy. 

Furthermore, experts also worry that other parts of the vaccine supply chain such as a shortage of glass vials and a lack of cargo planes to transport the vaccines worldwide could impede a global vaccination drive. 

Meanwhile, other logistics companies are increasing their cold storage capabilities. 

UPS for one is building two ‘freezer farms’ that can each store 48,000 vials of vaccine at temperatures as low as -80 Celsius, according to Bloomberg.

Source: Business Insider