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DHL moves a million vaccines – but many more to go

[ September 16, 2021   //   ]

DHL says it has delivered over a billion Covid vaccine doses to more than 160 countries as part of the global roll-out. its DHL Global Forwarding and DHL Express arms have been tasked with transporting vaccines on multiple routes from Europe and other origins to countries across Asia Pacific, South America, and Europe and is also responsible storage and local distribution of the vaccines in several German states.

However, as outlined in its white paper “Revisiting Pandemic Resilience”, another 7-9 billion vaccine doses will be needed annually in the coming years to keep (re-)infection rates low and to slow down the pace of virus mutations as well as to contain seasonal fluctuations.

It is calling for the logistics infrastructure and capacity built up for the pandemic to be maintained.

Chief Commercial Officer DH, Katja Busch, commented: “Looking back at the state of emergency these past nine months, we are honored to be playing our part, seamlessly managing and executing multiple supply chain set-ups without cold chain interruptions or security incidents. We are working across multiple supply chain set-ups and managing direct distributions in certain countries. We implemented new, dedicated, and reliable services at an accelerated speed to ship the highly temperature-sensitive vaccines, as well as ancillary supplies and test kits.”

President of life sciences & healthcare at DHL Customer Solutions and Innovation, Claudia Roa, added: “Our advantage is that we already had a sophisticated network in place with the necessary healthcare expertise. This allowed us to react swiftly.”

Vice president of life sciences and healthcare, Thomas Ellmann, concluded:  “The current Covid situation clearly demonstrates how collaboration across governments and NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, and logistics companies is the only way to beat pandemics, both now and in the future.”

To facilitate a speedy roll-out of medication governments and industries should maintain “ever-warm” manufacturing capacity, blueprint research, production, and procurement plans, and expand local deployment capabilities.

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