Three pharmaceutical companies have announced that their COVID-19 vaccine candidates have proven to be effective during late-stage clinical trials. All three companies — Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZenica jointly with Oxford University — are expected to apply for emergency FDA clearance in the coming weeks, which would mean that they could begin distributing and administering the vaccine.
"You're talking about 10 billion doses," he said, noting that some of the vaccines under development require two doses per person. "Most of the pharmaceutical shipments that move between Europe and the US, Europe and South America, Europe and even the Middle East and Africa, were moving in the bellies of [passenger] aircraft," St Onge said. "Many people may not realize it."
To maintain those temperatures during transit, shippers like DHL will have to rely on what St Onge described as "passive solutions," using specifically engineered packaging lined with replacable dry ice, rather than active refrigeration, which is too heavy and energy-hungry to work on an airplane. That requires a two-prong approach from DHL, St Onge said: working with vaccine manufacturers to develop the most efficient possible packaging and transport method, while also working with governments and NGOs to figure out how and where to deliver the vaccine in order to avoid the risk of spoilage.As it works to form plans in the face of so many remaining unknowns, DHL is preparing for two general shipping archetypes.
"We do warehouse vaccines and distribute them all over the world today," St Onge said. "What's really going to stress the infrastructure is the mix of frozen to regular, conventional vaccine temperature requirements." "It means knowing how to create the SOP, so you know exactly where all the touch points are, how you need to track it, what the process is," St Onge said. "We have a team that monitors these shipments 24/7/365, we're constantly on top of this. We built a cloud-based platform to allow us to control the details around that SOP, literally down to the lane level. And it's not uncommon that you may have 20 different SOPs for a particular product just in two airport pairs.
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