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The first shipment of a Covid-19 vaccine approved for public use could already be in the UK and on its way to distribution centers.
Doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab were being packaged for shipment on Wednesday and could arrive as soon as Thursday, according to Sean Marett, BioNTech’s chief commercial officer, making the UK the first country in the world to receive the vaccine. ready for administration.
But how will the vaccine be transported from the factory to the patient? And where is it manufactured?
The jab is being done by the pharmaceutical company in Puurs, a small Belgian town south of Antwerp. Pfizer will use road and air freight to ship the doses to Britain from Belgium.
The company has previously said it expects to move about 7.6 million doses a day to airports from its facilities in Belgium and Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Keeping it cool
The vaccine should be stored at around -70 ° C, but Pfizer has designed an innovative way to transport the vials to overcome this problem.
The doses will be packed in special cold boxes the size of a suitcase, filled with dry ice and GPS trackers. These reusable boxes can safely store up to 5,000 doses of the vaccine for 10 days.
UK border to distribution centers
Once it arrives in the UK, the vaccine will be collected by specialized transport operators and delivered to distribution centers.
Pfizer said it owns 40 sites and works with 200 suppliers globally to deliver its products. These partnerships are expected to be used in the UK to administer the doses, but which companies will ship the vaccines has yet to be confirmed.
In the US, DHL, FedEx, and UPS have been reported to ship the vaccine to regional distribution centers.
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