UPS

UPS Dealer Services Drive Better Performance

Receive exclusive MarketCenter dealer discounted pricing on: • Small package/parcels shipped via domestic ground/air and international services - Savings up to 20% for ground shipping - Savings up to 70% for air shipments

Reduce returns costs • Ensure compliance by controlling speed and cost of inbound shipments. • UPS Returns® services provide you and your customers full visibility and tracking for return shipments.

Improve operational efficiency

Quantum View® technology allows you to track your inbound and outbound UPS shipments, customize reports and keep your customers informed of shipment status or potential delays.

Simplify processing and billing UPS Billing Center allows you to receive and view your invoices faster, pay online and create reports to track shipping costs.

Streamline online sales

Turnkey solutions offered by UPS Ready® Marketplace Providers allow you to strengthen just about every aspect of your online offering — from website development to order management tools to streamline your orders from all sales channels.

To enroll, visit www.DealerCONNECT.com or visit the FCA US Market Center site located within Dealer Connect. To learn more about UPS’s Market Center Shipping Advantages: Contact the UPS support line at 1-800-567-9989.

© 2017 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved. 8/17

How to Ship a Vaccine at –80°C, and Other Obstacles in the Covid Fight - UPS

Developing an eff ec ve vaccine is the fi rst step. Then comes the ques on of how to deliver hundreds of millions of doses that may need to be kept at arc c temperatures.

By David Gelles

Many things will have to work out to end the coronavirus pandemic. Drug companies will have to develop a safe and eff ec ve vaccine. Billions of people will have to consent to vaccina on.

But there are more prosaic challenges, too. Among them: Companies may have to transport ny glass vials thousands of miles while keeping them as cold as the South Pole in the depths of winter.

A number of the leading Covid-19 vaccines under development will need to be kept at temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit) from the moment they are bo led to the me they are ready to be injected into pa ents’ arms.

That will not be easy. Vaccines may be manufactured on one con nent and shipped to another. They will go from logis cs hub to logis cs hub before ending up at the hospitals and other facili es that will administer them.

While no vaccine has yet been approved by health offi cials in the United States, prepara ons for a mass-vaccina on campaign are gearing up. The U.S. military and a federal contractor are expected to play a role in coordina ng the distribu on. But a hodgepodge of companies are scrambling to fi gure out how to keep hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine very, very cold.

Planes, trucks and warehouses will need to be ou i ed with freezers. Glass vials will need to withstand icy climes. Someone will need to make a lot more dry ice.

“We’re only now beginning to understand the complexi es of the delivery side of all of this,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and Interna onal Studies, a research fi rm. “And there’s no ge ng around it. These have stark temperature demands that will constrain access and delivery.”

President Trump asserted that hundreds of millions of doses of an uniden fi ed vaccine will be available to all Americans by April. That meline is more ambi ous than what his own advisers have described. Dr. Robert R. Redfi eld, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Preven on, told a Senate commi ee on Wednesday that a vaccine would not be widely available un l the middle of next year.

Of the three vaccines that have advanced to Phase 3 trials, two — one made by Moderna and the Na onal Ins tutes of Health, the other by Pfi zer and BioNTech — need to be kept in a near constant deep freeze.

Continued from Page 35 (They are made with gene c materials that fall apart when they thaw.) Pfi zer expects its vaccine to be stored in temperatures as low as minus 80 Celsius, while Moderna’s will need to be kept at minus 20 Celsius. Another leading vaccine candidate, being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, must be kept cool but not frozen.

McKesson, a major drug distributor, won a major federal contract last month to help distribute a coronavirus vaccine. Much of the work, however, will fall to companies outside the medical and drug industries. The major U.S. logis cs companies, including UPS and FedEx, already have networks of freezers that they use to ship perishable food and medical supplies. The companies have experience shipping vaccines for other illnesses, including the seasonal fl u.

But the Covid-19 vaccina on eff ort is likely to dwarf all previous campaigns. UPS said it was construc ng a socalled freezer farm in Louisville, Ky., the company’s largest hub, where it can store millions of doses at subzero temperatures.

Crea ng an en re warehouse that could maintain that deep freeze would have been too complex and costly. So instead, rows of upright industrial S rling Ultracold freezers, each capable of holding 48,000 vials, are being arranged inside a warehouse. There are 70 freezers so far, but the warehouse could fi t a few hundred. A similar UPS center is in the works in the Netherlands. “I haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Wes Wheeler, UPS’s head of health care. “Nothing has been quite this global in scale.”

At FedEx, the vaccine prepara ons are being led by Richard W. Smith, the son of the company’s founder, Fred W. Smith. The younger Mr. Smith, who runs the company’s airline opera ons in the Americas, was in charge of the life sciences business for FedEx’s airline opera ons in 2009, during the H1N1 pandemic. At the me, the U.S. government asked FedEx to prepare to help transport vaccines, Mr. Smith said, and the company doubled its number of freezers around the globe. “Fortunately, H1N1 did not rise to the level of the pandemic we thought it could be,” he said. “But that allowed us to really beef up our cold-chain infrastructure.”

In the years a er that scare, FedEx expanded its supply of freezers and worked with the Federal Avia on Administra on to win approval for its planes to carry more dry ice. (When dry ice melts, it emits carbon dioxide, making the air on planes poten ally unsafe for pilots and crew.)

Now FedEx is adding freezers that can maintain temperatures as low as minus 80 Celsius in ci es including Memphis, Indianapolis and Paris. It is installing addi onal refrigerated trailers in Oakland, Calif., Dallas and Los Angeles, which could be used for vaccines that need to be served chilled, not frozen.

“The demand for this is huge,” Mr. Smith said. “We know it’s going to be a very substan al market.” Analysts at Ci agreed, saying the business of transpor ng vaccines is likely to be profi table in a recent note sugges ng that FedEx stock was a good investment. As if the challenge weren’t suffi ciently daun ng, the world is facing a looming shortage of dry ice — an unexpected side eff ect of the pandemic.

Dry ice, the stuff that exudes chilly smoke and enthralls school-age scien sts, is made from carbon dioxide, which is most commonly created as a byproduct during the produc on of ethanol.

But ethanol produc on ebbs and fl ows based on the demand for gasoline. This spring, as stay-at-home orders went into eff ect, people began driving less.

As a result, ethanol produc on slumped, and so did the supply of carbon dioxide.

Continued from Page 36 In April, Richard Go wald, chief execu ve of the Compressed Gas Associa on, sent a le er to Vice President Mike Pence warning of “a signifi cant risk of a shortage in carbon dioxide.”

Five months later, “the ethanol industry s ll has not bounced back,” Mr. Go wald said in an interview. “We are seeing a shortage.” And that is making dry ice hard to come by.

For much of the summer, Marc Savenor, owner of Acme Dry Ice in Cambridge, Mass., which supplies medical companies, has been running low on carbon dioxide. Supply was the ghtest he had seen in his 42 years of business, forcing Mr. Savenor to ra on his dry ice.

“It was like a McDonald’s with no hamburgers,” he said, adding that carbon dioxide seemed to more plen ful in recent weeks.

UPS and FedEx are taking ma ers into their own hands. FedEx already has machines in warehouses that can produce dry ice, and UPS said it was considering adding them.

The companies will also have to provide their delivery employees with special training and equipment like gloves to handle their icy wares.

Pfi zer has designed a special box to transport its hoped-for vaccine. The boxes, roughly the size of a large cooler, will hold a couple of hundred glass vials, each containing 10 to 20 doses of vaccine. Continued on Page 38

Continued from Page 37 The boxes are equipped with GPS-enabled thermal sensors, allowing Pfi zer to know where the boxes are and how cold they are. (If they get too warm, workers can add dry ice.)

All of this leads to another problem: Glass o en cracks in extreme cold. Early this year, Corning, a 169-year-old glass maker in upstate New York, approached offi cials at the Department of Health and Human Services with a warning: There wouldn’t be enough cold-resistant glass vials to handle a frozen vaccine, said Brendan Mosher, Corning’s head of pharmaceu cal technologies.

Corning pitched a solu on. It could make millions of vials with a new type of pharmaceu cal-grade glass that can withstand the lowest temperatures. In June, the government awarded the company a $204 million contract to increase its produc on of the special vials. The new glass is made without boron, a common ingredient in conven onal glass that can lead to contamina on of whatever is in the vials.

Mr. Mosher said Corning was using the federal money to quadruple the capacity at its plant in Big Flats, N.Y.; to accelerate construc on of a glass furnace in New Jersey; and to speed up construc on of an addi onal plant in North Carolina. Corning is hiring 300 workers and says it is on track to start producing hundreds of millions of glass vials next year.

Even if there is enough dry ice and chilled warehouses and sturdy vials, everyday pharmacies are unlikely to be equipped to stockpile large quan es of vaccines that require ultracold storage. Nevertheless, they might be able to keep Pfi zer’s cooler-size boxes on hand, and Moderna’s vaccine can be stored at less extreme temperatures in the days before it is administered.

In a presenta on to the White House coronavirus task force last month, Kathleen Dooling, a disease expert with the C.D.C., said strict temperature requirements “will make it very diffi cult for community clinics and local pharmacies to store and administer.” She said the vaccine would have to be dispensed “at centralized sites with adequate equipment and high throughput.” It’s not clear where those sites will be or who will administer the vaccines.

That is just in the United States. A vaccine requiring stringent temperature controls would be off limits for much of the developing world. A recent study by DHL and McKinsey found that a cold vaccine would be accessible to about 2.5 billion people in 25 countries. Large parts of Africa, South America and Asia, where super-cold freezers are sparse, would be le out.

“The consequence is to reinforce the staggering bias in favor of the wealthy and powerful few countries,” said Mr. Morrison, of the Center for Strategic and Interna onal Studies.

David Gelles is the Corner Offi ce columnist and a business reporter. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twi er. @dgelles