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| Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, before the first shipment of Covishield leaves the firm’s Pune plant. Photo: twitter/Adar Poonawalla |
Source: Business-Standard
Three temperature-controlled trucks filled with Covid-19 vaccine vials pulled out of Serum Institute’s production plant in Pune at 5 a.m on Tuesday, marking the start of a mega immunization drive in the country. The jabs will be administered beginning January 16. The trucks that headed to the Pune Airport were specially designed containers equipped with sensors monitoring location, temperature, light exposure and unusual jolting. The first flight to ship out the vaccine to Delhi was a SpiceJet Boeing-737 carrying 22 boxes. Each box weighing 32 kg contained around 12,000 doses of Covishield vaccines and gel packs- a portable plastic bag filled with refrigerant gel. A GoAir flight to Chennai followed shortly.
The jabs will be administered beginning January 16
In all, nine flights transported over 5.6 million doses of the vaccine to 13 cities across the country, prompting civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s office to compare the effort to Hanuman carrying Sanjeevani from the Himalayas. Videh Kumar Jaipuriar, CEO of Delhi International Airport, summed up the exercise. ‘’We have synergized, collaborated over multiple months with exporters, importers, logistic companies, freight forwarders, government, police to ensure faster turnaround for vaccines.’’ The air cargo terminals at the airport would work 24x7 to support the vaccine movement. . As the Spicejet aircraft landed in Delhi after a two-hour flight, the vaccine boxes were transported by cool dollies to warehouses which can maintain a capacity of 5.7 million vials a day.
After the first lot of doses landed in four major zonal centres--Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai--these were trucked to hospitals from where it would be distributed to thousands of nursing homes, hospitals and dispensaries across 718 districts. Vaccines arriving in Delhi and other hubs get the fast-lane treatment meant for priority packages, with an early delivery commitment the following day. That’s part of the logistics worked out for the vaccine transportation. Kunal Agarwal, co-founder at Kool-Ex Cold Chain, however, said, “for us, carrying this vaccine is just a new product in our business which we have been doing for years. Whether Serum or Bharat Biotech, these are our old clients. Our trucks are bulk carriers of vaccines and are meant for long haul transport.’’ Truck fleets that work with pharmaceutical companies typically go through quality audits and certifications.
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