Shock ... no planes are equipped with refrigerators to transport the Corona vaccine
The United States is the first country to use the Corona vaccine from the Pfizer drug company, but transporting the Corona vaccine outside the country is still very difficult.
There are many factors that must be considered when starting to distribute the Corona vaccine, and on top of these factors are the very low temperatures in which the vaccine must be stored. Therefore, the available or transferred quantities of the Corona vaccine will remain limited, according to France Press.
So far, there is no equipped plane to transport the Corona vaccine, and no passenger plane, not even a cargo plane, will be able to maintain the Corona vaccine at a temperature of minus 80 degrees (minus 112 Fahrenheit) specified by the American company Pfizer for its vaccine.
But Richard Forson, CEO of Cargolux Airlines International, the largest air cargo company in Europe, said that passenger planes will be able to transport Corona virus vaccines at extremely low temperatures as required, as long as they are stored in specially made boxes. In other words, he relied on the boxes to keep the temperatures low.
Transferring the Corona vaccine:
According to France Press, the Pfizer vaccine, to be distributed in the United States, will come from its largest production plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The shipment of vaccines will be a carefully regulated process between containers, trucks and airplanes.
The thermal shipping containers will be filled with dry ice and 975 vaccine vials each containing 5 doses for a total of 4,875 doses.
And every day, 6 dose trucks will be transported to air carriers such as FedEx, UPS and DHL that will distribute them across the United States within a day or two and in the world within 3 days, as Pfizer announced, and the group expects to make about 20 cargo flights a day in the world.
And Julie Swan, an epidemiologist at North Carolina State University, warned that the vaccine would not be suitable for distribution to doctors' offices and small pharmacies. At the very least, Americans will have to first go to hospitals or even to larger distribution centers set up in parking lots, just as tests for infection with the Coronavirus are carried out, she said.
Corona vaccines can remain in their packages for two weeks, which means that hospitals will not need special refrigerators.
Transferring the "Corona" vaccine around the world
Janelle Roth, of the Centers for Epidemiological Control and Prevention, announced that at this stage we do not recommend that hospitals or clinics purchase high-cooling equipment.
The American company Moderna is also developing a vaccine for the Coronavirus that can be stored at 4 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, which is a normal degree for a freezer.
Pfizer expects to produce 50 million doses this year and 1.3 billion in 2021, and the United States has requested 100 million doses, including 20-30 million doses delivered at the end of December. The European Union recommended 200 million doses, Japan 120 million, Britain 30 million, and Canada 20 million.
The companies Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson, Johnson, Sanofi and others hope that their vaccines will be effective and safe for global distribution.
As for the transport companies, the DHL transport company announced that it could distribute 15 million cool boxes during the next two years, with nearly 15 thousand flights in the world.
Poor countries that do not have large capacity to store quantities of the vaccine that need refrigeration have little chance of benefiting from the first doses, said Prashant Yadav, an expert in health supply chains at the Center for Global Development.
He said that the cost of high-cooling refrigerators can reach 112 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, five times higher than standard refrigerators and are made to order only.
