A vaccine for COVID-19 finally appears to be in sight, and cold chain logistic companies will be critical to its distribution.

Share Market Live

NSE

Sunil Nair, CEO of Snowman Logistics said in an interview to CNBC-TV18 that no firm in India had the capability or capacity to transport things colder than minus 40 degrees. The Pfizer vaccine requires minus 70 degree storage, making it difficult to transport

“There are multiple candidates who are trying out their own vaccines and temperature range is also kept in mind while they are considering the countries they want to target. Coming to the Pfizer vaccine, there are multiple news article saying different temperature, the latest says it is -17. So if it is -17 or even up to -30 there are cold storages available. In fact all our cold storage facilities can take care of that temperatures so there is no problem, transportation is also available.”

“But if it is -70, then yes, not just for India, any country on this earth will have this difficulty of logistic storing as well as transporting at that temperature. Hence someone will have to come up with different technology.”

On the company’s current capacity, Nair said, “Going up to -40 if I take that as then we have one lakh pellets positions total capacity and as of now the spare capacity is around 15,000 pellets positions and depending on the requirement we can increase it by creating some more space. Each pellet can accommodate 6000-7000 doses of vaccine.”

On additional capacity Nair said, “We are adding 20 percent capacity and that should be up and running by March 2021 and all those additions are also capable of going up to -30.”

Watch this video for more.

(Edited by : Santosh Nair)

First Published:Nov 10, 2020 11:58 AM IST