Vaccine distribution w/ fragile vaccine is hard.
Pfizer's vaccine needing a -80C freezer is making it hard to get it to the most needy people. And shipping containers of 975 doses are making it harder still.
Short thread
Pfizer's vaccine needing a -80C freezer is making it hard to get it to the most needy people. And shipping containers of 975 doses are making it harder still.
Short thread
Everyone is understandably excited about Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, w/ 95% efficacy against symptomatic cases (but data not so clear for severe infections:
https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/1336446195284070400). Now, we need to get it to the people most in need & fast.
Why fast? B/c there are 200K new cases/day in US (maybe 800K infections/day (
https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/1321918854029692928) & ~600K globally? About 0.5-1% of these infections will lead to death (
https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/1252844190070829056) a month from now. So time is critical & every day matters.
Which communities are hardest hit by COVID? Usually lower income communities of color. Which communities are less likely to have -80C freezers? Lower income communities of color.
Vaccine can be held at refrigerator temp for 5 d after thawing, so no problem, right? Not so easy. Each box of Pfizer vaccine is 975 doses. What are odds that a given hospital w/out a -80C freezer will have exactly (or at least) 975 people in highest priority category? Not 100%.
What do we do? Do we allocate a box of vaccine to a hospital in a low income area where transmission is raging even if they don't have a -80C freezer or 975 people to vaccinate? Wouldn't that waste precious doses?
You can see the challenges that we are facing now.
You can see the challenges that we are facing now.
No easy solutions. Moderna vaccine has much easier holding conditions and smaller shipments, but lower capacity this year than Pfizer. So, we'll be struggling with this issue for a while.
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