WHO chief urges halt to booster shots for rest of the year

[BumRushDaShow]

11. One of the issues that I saw was brought up going forward with these vaccines

from the last ACIP meeting, was the size of the cases of vials (number of vials per tray and trays per box). So this is what they are looking at as an issue -

Pfizer designed its own custom cooler box to make it easier to transport its vaccines across the U.S. and around the world. Vials are placed into trays, with 195 vials per tray. Each box can fit five trays. Each box of 5,850 doses has a GPS tracker and contains a monitor that keeps a log of the temperature.

https://theconversation.com/how-a-vial-of-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-travels-from-a-lab-in-missouri-to-an-arm-in-bangladesh-162572

Plus Pfizer has these recommendations for storage -

Once a POU receives a thermal shipper with our vaccine, they have three options for storage:

- Ultra-low-temperature freezers, which are commercially available and can extend shelf life for up to six months.

- The Pfizer thermal shippers, in which doses will arrive, that can be used as temporary storage units by refilling with dry ice every five days for up to 30 days of storage.

- Refrigeration units that are commonly available in hospitals. The vaccine can be stored for five days at refrigerated 2-8°C conditions.

After storage for up to 30 days in the Pfizer thermal shipper, vaccination centers can transfer the vials to 2-8°C storage conditions for an additional five days, for a total of up to 35 days. Once thawed and stored under 2-8°C conditions, the vials cannot be re-frozen or stored under frozen conditions.

The various storage options at the POU allow for equitable access to the Pfizer vaccine to areas with differing infrastructure.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/covid_19_vaccine_u_s_distribution_fact_sheet

And as I understand it, the vials are filled to handle something like 6 doses per vial. So if there is a better way to parcel this out in smaller tray sizes, it might make it easier to deal with as the others can stay in the ultra cold storage for the "up to 6 months" recommendation since we are no longer doing "mass vaccinations" of several thousand a day at some particular location in a geographic area.