India Needs Good Cold Storage Facilities For COVID-19 Vaccine

New Delhi: Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is just the tip of the iceberg for India. The bigger challenge is to keep it safe till the time it is administered.

India will need to ramp up its cold chain facilities for the safe delivery of the vaccines. With most frontrunner vaccine candidates likely to require ‘extra cold’ storage, the private sector could also be roped in for effective delivery of a preventive when it is available, Hindustan Times (HT) reported experts telling PTI.

With the likelihood of some vaccines hitting the market by early next year, two things are most important: Securing “last mile connectivity” and ensuring that nothing goes wrong before the shot is administered.

“Most frontrunners require extremely stringent cold chains, making them immensely challenging for India to implement,” Satyajit Rath from New Delhi’s National Institute of Immunology (NII), PTI reported.

The immunologist noted that some COVID-19 vaccines will need storage temperatures that simply cannot be realistically managed in any large-scale Indian campaign.

Virtually all vaccines need to be transported at cold temperatures, usually between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, said Raghavan Varadarajan, professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru in the report.

“The necessity is to keep the vaccine product cold, either refrigerated or frozen. This is a constraint especially with large numbers of doses,” Varadarajan told PTI, explaining the particular problems of India that has a population of 1.3 billion, second only to China.

Many vaccines lose potency when exposed to higher temperatures, he said, and re-cooling does not help.

Thus we need what is called the cold chain of handling before use, Varadarajan told PTI. His team at IISc is working on a “warm vaccine” that can be stored for over a month at 37 degrees Celsius, and needs no cold chain for storage.

“India must restructure with the purpose to start and finish the immunisation programme within a short time period to be effective. Even if the vaccine is ready, the programme should not be commenced until the last mile for administering the vaccine is prepared,”  Pawanexh Kohli, the founding CEO of India’s National Centre for Cold-Chain Development (NCCD) told PTI.