Shipping hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine at -80C is more than a “minor logistical challenge”. First, you’d never ship in a liquid nitrogen dewar. It would be a massive logistics bottleneck considering the weight of dewars and the volume you'd be shipping (Pfizer already has deals secured for hundreds of millions of doses). And plus, these are packaged vaccines - a glass vial with a label, in a paper box, with a folded product info sheet inside. You can't submerge the whole thing in liquid nitrogen.

Shipping at -10C is a major logistical challenge. Mentally it doesn't sound like like much, but that's envisioning a single vial to a single patient. Multiply that by one million and deliveries to not only NYC but to Booneville, Louisiana. Temperature excursions mean spoiled product - product that gets thrown out. -80C is way harder than -20C (there are no vaccines today that require -80C).

You can’t just throw it on dry ice and say “we’re good”. Even just packing it is complicated. You have a pallet sized box with 20,000 doses. You put it in a box and surround it with dry ice. Are all the vials the same temperature after 2 hours? Are you sure? You need temperature monitoring at multiple points in the package so you know when it’s been spoiled.

Your delivery gets held up for 12 hours at customs, are all the vials still -80C? Are you sure? What do you do when you deliver to hospital and find out they don’t have -80C storage, even though they said they did? Do you have an intermediary storage facility you can bring it to until you figure out a solution?

Do you have monitoring after it’s been delivered so it doesn’t spoil before administration? Correct thawing procedures? What happens if a dose is thawed and the patient doesn’t show up and it sits at room temp for an hour? Just throw it out? Or is it still good? Are you sure?

And to add on top of all this - you (as the manufacturer) might have all this figured out, but you need to make sure everyone along the logistics chain does too. Guaranteed you'd send emails and letters in advance, and have massive yellow stickers all over the shipment that says "Must be stored at -80C" and you'll have a customer call you a week later asking if the product that's been sitting at -10C is still good.

Here is a document from WHO that will tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about cold chain distribution. There is an entire section on how to appropriately stack the vaccine vials in the freezer so they stay the right temperature. Yeah, it's that complicated.

https://www.who.int/immunization/documents/IIP2015_Module2.p...

Even cold chain for today’s products is really fucking hard.

Derek Lowe had a good quote on this:

"Pfizer has provided these details to the CDC about shipping and storage of their candidate: the vaccine can be shipped in “dry ice pack” boxes, but that dry ice will need to be replenished within 24 hours of receipt. The shipping carton needs to be closed within one minute of opening, and not opened more than twice per day. Vaccine vials, once removed, can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to 24 hours or at room temperature for no more than 2 hours after thawing. So this is going to take a very organized approach to make sure that the vaccine is handled properly without wastage. We’re looking at a lot of dry ice and a lot of orders for ultra-cold freezers if this is the candidate that gets heavy nationwide distribution. And mind you, I’m talking about organized distribution in Little Rock and Long Beach. What about La Paz and Lahore? What about Lubumbashi? Even back inside the US, what’s the nearest source of dry ice in Shiprock, New Mexico or Oceana, West Virginia?"

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/31/co...