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Hypermotion
Vaccine Logistics Alliance and Abu Dhabi’s Hope Consortium plan for potential 20 billion global vaccine deliveries by year-end
Senior officials from the UAE’s supply chain and logistics sectors recently shared their insights into how the country is leading the way in the distribution of billions of covid-19 vaccines across the globe in a recent webinar.
The Vaccine Logistics Alliance (VLA) and the Hope Consortium are two UAEbased groups comprising government and private entities collaborating to ensure an expected surge of inoculations are delivered safely and efficiently this year, in particular to developing countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South-East Asia.
Together with more than a dozen global pharma, airline, ports, and freight forwarding partners, the two groups plan to have the capacity to transport, store, and deliver more than 20bn Covid-19 vaccine doses across the globe by the end of 2021.
Colossal task
“Undertaking such a mammoth task in developing countries with little existing infrastructure is a huge challenge,” asserted Robert Sutton, Head of Logistics Cluster, Abu Dhabi Ports, a founding member of the Hope Consortium, which includes 13 other regional and global partners.
Sutton added that cooperation and collaboration between the consortium’s partners and network of external partners is critical in ensuring vaccines are not just delivered, but administered safely:
“We go beyond the movement of products; we support the deployment of nurses, doctors, field hospitals, and tents into the countries that need it most,” he continued.
Top stakeholders
Ryan Quinlan, Chief Commercial Officer, Supply Chain & Logistics, DP World, and Dennis Lister, Vice President of Cargo Commercial Development, Emirates SkyCargo were also part of the webinar.
DP World, a global ports operator, and Emirates, Dubai’s flagship airline, teamed up with Dubai Airports and International Humanitarian City (IHC), a Dubaibased global centre for humanitarian emergency response, to form the Vaccine Logistics Alliance in January 2021.
Dennis Lister, VP, Cargo Commercial Development, Emirates.
Logistics challenges
Quinlan said the international vaccine distribution drive now underway is the largest single logistics challenge globally since the end of the Second World War. “Dubai’s ideal location at the cross-roads of multiple continents combined with an already robust cross-border trade
Ryan Quinlan, CCO, Supply Chain & Logistics, DP World.
infrastructure meant the Emirate was ideally positioned to distribute the vaccine efficiently and effectively,” he noted.
He added DP World felt a responsibility to ensure that vaccines are rolled out in emerging markets, with its global network of ports, terminals, and logistics infrastructures in 61 countries on six continents.
Lister added Emirates’ network of more than 130 destinations means it has direct access to emerging markets severely affected by the pandemic: “If you’d fly out from Dubai, within maybe four hours, you basically hit more than three billion people,” observed Lister.
Vital commodities
“There are two important commodities in the world that need to continue to fly around the world, and that’s food and medicine,” Lister continued. “We move 600 tons of food and 250 tons of medicine pharmaceuticals daily around the world. Our responsibility is to ensure we continue to fly because people need food, people need medicine, and we will continue to do that.”
“What we’ve built in an incredibly short period of time, and we’re talking about months, not years is a vaccine hub geographically that can handle over 120 million vaccines at any point in time. We’ve also built the biggest freezer farm in the region that can handle 11 to 15 million doses of vaccines in temperatures of minus 80 (Celsius),” explained Sutton.
“One of the key takeaways I would like to share is that we’ve achieved more with collaboration. Collaboration has been one of the key pillars of our success. We’ve been transparent and our partners trust us,” he stressed.
“They’ve invested in us to work with them, to make sure that we collaborate collectively. There will be speed bumps. There will be challenges along the way, but by leveraging all of the different partners and maintaining that level of transparency, we achieve a lot more together,” affirmed Sutton.
Robert Sutton, Head of Logistics Cluster, ADP.
Consortiums
The Hope Consortium, with all its different partners, currently has the capacity to transport, store and deliver up to six billion vaccine doses, with this growing to potentially 18bn by the end of 2021.
The VLA meanwhile was established to expedite the delivery of two billion doses to emerging markets in 2021, in support of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) COVAX initiative.
The ‘Supply Chain lessons from the UAE-led global vaccine rollout’ webinar was hosted by Messe Frankfurt Middle East, the organiser of Hypermotion Dubai, and Materials Handling Middle East.
