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To help prepare for a possible Covid-19 vaccine, researchers are launching a new project in India to help design an efficient and sustainable delivery mechanism.
If a Covid-19 vaccine is developed, scientists and countries will still face challenges in distributing that vaccine globally. Universal access to vaccines is a major challenge due to the lack of robust cold chains, which particularly affect low-income countries.
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization estimates that only 10% of health care facilities in the world’s poorest countries have a reliable supply of electricity, while in some countries less than 5% of health centers have qualified refrigerators. for vaccines.
Now, researchers from the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, will collaborate with non-profit academic and business partners to begin investigating the scale of challenges involved in distributing a potentially temperature-sensitive Covid-19 vaccine. .
Backed by the Shakti Foundation for Sustainable Energy, the researchers will examine the challenges in developing an efficient vaccine delivery system, focusing on infrastructure in different countries and the necessary resources.
In India, research led by the Center for Environmental Education, and supported by business partners such as Zanotti (a part of the Daikin Group), Sure Chill and Nexleaf Analytics, will begin to examine infrastructure-related challenges when enough are developed cold chain capabilities.
Shubhashis Dey, Associate Director of the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, commented: “Covid-19 related mass immunization requirements offer us an opportunity not only to increase our vaccine production, but also to create a robust cold chain system logistics that can handle the country’s overall vaccine needs. The vaccination program will require that millions of citizens of all age groups be vaccinated in a short period of time. Our effort is designed to help India overcome this massive logistics challenge in a sustainable way and create a global adoption model. “
Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University are already exploring how “Community Cooling Centers” can integrate food cold chains with other cold-dependent services, such as community health facilities, social facilities, and even emergency services.
They hope their research can help develop a short and medium-term exit solution to administer a Covid-19 vaccine efficiently. Furthermore, their work could create a long-term contingency framework by establishing logistics specifically for drugs, blood, and vaccines.
Toby Peters, professor of Cold Economics at the University of Birmingham, said: “Universal access to the vaccine is already a great challenge. With Covid-19, a rapid mass immunization will likely be required; Maintaining a continuous cold chain to quickly transport and deliver Covid-19 vaccines to all communities, many of which electricity supply and cooling infrastructure are often lacking or unreliable, will be a daunting task.
“Since most of the technologies implemented today will still be in operation in the next decade, the emergence of sustainable and off-grid cold chain devices gives us the opportunity to create sustainable solutions for the deployment of the Covid-19 vaccine. They can also deliver resilience and sustainable health cold chain systems as a lasting legacy. “
The lack of an effective cold chain results in 1.5 million deaths each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates. Furthermore, the WHO estimates that 25% of some vaccines are wasted each year due to temperature control and logistical failures.
Professor Peters added: “Ultimately, we need a global effort to prepare the vaccine and, in parallel, a global strategy to develop appropriate and sustainable equitable cold chains and achieve this with minimal environmental impact.
“We need to think immediately if we want to define sustainable and inclusive solutions that can be delivered quickly and at scale to overcome this pandemic and unlock connections between the deployment of the Covid-19 vaccine, the sustainable cold chain and the development of clean energy infrastructure. . “
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