COVER STORY Emirates SkyCargo opened the world’s first dedicated airside cargo hub for the vaccine in Dubai. CREDIT: EMIRATES SKYCARGO
A NOVEL SUPPLY CHAIN
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Pressure Mounts to Bring Covid-19 Vaccines to the World
he end of 2020 marked a new beginning for a trade that nobody had anticipated at the start of that same year: global distribution on an incomparable scale of Covid-19 vaccines. And it is a trade that could keep breakbulk air freight providers and project cargo specialists delivering the huge refrigeration units needed at critical transshipment hubs busy well into 2021. A mid-December paper published in the peer-reviewed medical trade journal the BMJ on Global, Regional, and National Estimates of Target Population Sizes for Covid-19 Vaccination: Descriptive Study, put the scale of vaccine transportation potential into perspective. The report’s academic authors took the population of the 194 member states of the World Health Organization as a starting point to calculate that the target population willing to be vaccinated stands at 3.7 billion. With some vaccines requiring double doses for efficacy, the transportation demand is vast. In a white paper, logistics specialist DHL drilled the need down 10 BREAKBULK MAGAZINE www.breakbulk.com
BY CARLY FIELDS
further to some 200,000 movements by pallet on 15,000 flights over the next two years. Agility Vice President of Life Sciences Eric Ten Kate put it another way: “The air cargo capacity requirement for a global Covid-19 vaccine effort is anticipated to be five times the normal air cargo requirement for transport of all vaccines over 2019.” For Kate, there are many moving parts when it comes to understanding the ongoing logistics needs for the vaccines: “There are so many variables both on the vaccinedevelopment front and in efforts to build a supply chain that can deliver vaccines. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the science or on the supply chain side, so we still have a lot of unknowns.”
MIDDLE EAST EXPERIENCE
Dubai is no stranger to vaccine transportation. State-owned Emirates SkyCargo has more than two decades of experience in transporting
temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals, including vaccines. In 2019, it transported more than 75 million kilograms of pharmaceuticals on its aircraft. In 2016 it introduced a specialized product, Emirates Pharma, and invested heavily in developing European Union good distribution practice, or GDP, certified fit-forpurpose facilities dedicated to pharmaceuticals in its hub in Dubai. The operator has also invested in cool dollies – a mobile temperature-controlled facility – to protect the cargo from temperature fluctuations during transit. In response to the specific transportation needs of the Covid-19 vaccines, Emirates SkyCargo opened the world’s first dedicated airside cargo hub for the vaccine in Dubai in October with more than 4,000 square meters of temperature-controlled GDP-certified dedicated pharma storage area. But it is not just hardware that needs to be up to the task; there is a human element to consider as well: “As part of our pharma corridors program, we have also worked with ISSUE 1 / 2021
