Covid 19 Vaccine Supply Prepping For Challenge Extraordinaire

India will have a very strategic role to play in ensuring universal access to COVID-19 vaccines. All stakeholders must step up their game to eliminate chinks in the supply chain and successfully execute this critical task

- Lakshmipriya Nair

COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be a reality very soon, and the world lives in the belief that it will help vanquish the coronavirus. Yet, as experts rightly point out ensuring universal access to these vaccines will be a very crucial aspect in the battle strategy against the wily virus which has disrupted lives and livelihoods worldwide. And, supplying billions of COVID-19 vaccine doses efficiently across the globally, with utmost care for their efficacy, when they are approved and available for distribution is going will be the ultimate logistics challenge witnessed until now.

A few weeks earlier, DHL along with McKinsey, published a white paper on ‘Delivering Pandemic Resilience’, which highlights, “To provide global coverage of COVID-19 vaccines, up to ~200,000 pallet shipments and ~15 million deliveries in cooling boxes as well as ~15,000 flights will be required across the various supply chain set-ups.”

The DHL-McKinsey whitepaper also identifies key hurdles in COVID-19 vaccine logistics. Take a look at some of the pain points that the report highlights (Check out Fig 1).

Hence, Express Pharma spoke to a few players in the pharma logistics space to gain more insights into the three biggest challenges that the logistics sector will be faced with and the preparations underway to tackle them. Because after all, aren’t we only as strong as our weakest link?

Ultra-low transport and storage temperatures