Pfizer and UPS are Driving More Effective Cold Chain Supply

One of the biggest challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the need to rollout a vaccination program to more people than ever before. Attempting to vaccinate just shy of eight billion people is no mean feat and the project has tested pharmaceutical supply chains to breaking point.

This is especially true for the Pfizer vaccine which must be stored at a temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius – a temperature which requires special dry ice packaging which can maintain these temperatures for up to ten days.

Logistics giant UPS is meeting and building on this challenge by offering a permanent cold chain solution throughout its healthcare division. With the new UPS Cold Chain Solutions product, the carrier takes care of storage, logistics and freight, all while tracking temperature diversions from command centres in Louisville, Kentucky, and Amsterdam.

"We began to see as a company what was going to happen," said Dan Gagnon, Vice President for global healthcare marketing and strategy at UPS. "We saw the innovation in vaccines; we saw that there were new vaccines that were coming out that required frozen storage and frozen transportation."

UPS and Pfizer will be combining their strength to keep the temperature sensitive COVID-19 vaccine moving, but it’s also reassuring to know this infrastructure will remain in place beyond the current crisis.