What Temperature Does the Covid Vaccine Need to Be Stored at

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Key Takeaways

• The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have different storage requirements.
• The Pfizer vaccine has to be kept at a frigid -70 °C while the Moderna vaccine tin can exist kept slightly warmer.
• Experts say that the Pfizer vaccine's difficult storage requirements could pose challenges during distribution.

Within two and a one-half weeks of each other, two big-name pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer (working with BioNTech) and Moderna produced viable COVID-19 vaccines that potentially signaled the kickoff of the end of the pandemic.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccine candidates received emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Dec 2020.

They were rolled out about nine months after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially alleged COVID-xix a global public health crisis—the fastest turnaround time in earth history.

Takeaway

The previous tape-holder, the mumps vaccine, took more than four times every bit long to come across the light of twenty-four hours.

The Pfizer vaccine (whose working proper noun is BNT162b2), has stringent storage requirements. It must be kept unusually cold—nearly minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit), or within a range of minus 80 to minus threescore degrees Celsius (minus 112 to minus 76 F).

To put this in perspective, this is chillier than a winter's twenty-four hour period in Antarctica.

And by dissimilarity, the seasonal flu vaccine has to be kept at a comparatively warm 4 degrees Celsius or 39.two degrees Fahrenheit, according to Sheila Keating, PhD, associate professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Schoolhouse of Medicine.

What This Ways For You

Different temperature storage requirements for approved or authorized COVID-19 vaccines may affect which vaccine will be hands accessible to you in the future.

How Volition These Storage Demands Be Met?

Keating anticipates that these requirements will significantly complicate the distribution of the Pfizer vaccine. In guild to ensure the efficacy of the vaccine, people volition need to be vaccinated at "centralized locations with access to minus lxxx degrees Celsius freezers" or dry ice containers, she said.

This equipment is loftier maintenance in and of itself. Dry ice containers need "to be replenished regularly, and dry ice supply may evidence to be difficult to maintain," she said.

Pfizer has tried to preempt criticism past developing and manufacturing storage units specifically tailored to the vaccine. Roughly the size of a suitcase, these units can carry at least 975 doses and are packed with plenty dry out ice "to recharge it one more time," said Jessica Atwell, PhD, banana scientist in the partitioning of global affliction epidemiology and control in the section of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Wellness.

However, it won't be feasible to transport them worldwide.

"Doing that in high-income countries like the U.S. is one thing," Atwell said. "Trying to exercise that in low- and middle-income countries around the globe, (with) even a normal 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, refrigerator-like temperature, can exist really difficult in many parts of the world. And so information technology'due south definitely an implementation challenge."

Perchance the biggest barrier to the widespread distribution of a vaccine that needs to be kept as cold as Pfizer's is there's no precedent for it.

"We don't currently use whatever [vaccines] that require minus 70-degree storage," Atwell said.

How Does Pfizer Stack Up To Its Main Competitor?

The Moderna vaccine (besides known every bit mRNA-1273) is lower maintenance. It needs to be kept at about minus twenty degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) or a range betwixt minus 25 to minus fifteen Celsius (-minus 13 to 5 Fahrenheit).

(By contrast, the storage environs of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is insufficiently warm: Information technology must be stored at between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit).

Why Must These Vaccines Exist Stored at Different Temperatures?

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, significant that they are made using fragments of viral genetic textile.

Essentially, Atwell says, the two vaccines are "lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate the messenger RNA inside" and take a stabilizing effect. She attributes the big temperature variation in their storage temperature requirements to the "sort of lipid nanoparticles that encapsulates the mRNA."

Simply put, the vaccines must be kept then cold to foreclose them from breaking downwards. If they practise, they become useless.

Even scientists would similar to know why there is such a disparity betwixt the Pfizer and Moderna storage requirements. But they know the answers prevarication in the scientific formulations for the vaccines. And drug companies are known to guard these "recipes" zealously.

And so in other words, scientists may never know for certain.

"It just comes downwards to what their data is," vaccine researcher Margaret Liu tells NPR. "If their data shows that information technology's more stable at a certain temperature, that'due south it."

While drugmakers are sure to keep their secrets "close to the vest," information technology's always possible that some researcher, somewhere, volition unlock the mystery—and maybe remove one of the impediments of getting "shots in arms" across the country and across the world.

The information in this article is current equally of the date listed, which means newer information may exist available when you read this. For the most recent updates on COVID-19, visit our coronavirus news page.

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Source: https://www.verywellhealth.com/covid-19-vaccine-temperature-storage-requirement-5091841

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