The IATA article was from a Media pack - obviously banging the big drum for the industry
the LLoyds list article is more ... thoughtful.."The International Air Transport Association (IATA) in Septemberstressed that the potential size of the vaccine delivery operation “is enormous”, estimating that “just providing a single dose to 7.8 billion people would fill 8,000 B747 cargo aircraft”. IATA said governments “must also consider the current diminished cargo capacity of the global air transport industry”, warning that, with the severe downturn in passenger traffic, airlines have downsized networks and put many aircraft into remote long-term storage............................. However, freight forwarding and logistics specialists have told Lloyd’s Loading List that as further information has subsequently emerged about the nature of the vaccines and their likely manufacturing locations and logistical needs, they have become less concerned about the challenge in terms of flown air freight capacity.
Intra-regional distribution a factor
Mads Ravn, EVP and Global Head of Air Freight at forwarder DSV Panalpina, commented: “Unlike PPE and the extreme surge for air capacity in the second quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 vaccine will be produced more locally, and as such intra-regional distribution will offset much of the long-haul air cargo demand. The shipping of COVID-19 vaccine will be more complex, but we do not foresee the same capacity crunch as experienced earlier this year.” Neel Jones Shah, global head of air freight at Flexport, who observed: “If we take Pfizer for example, for the North American audience, the vast majority of the production will be manufactured in the US, which means they won’t need to rely on air transport but can rely on road transport.” Christoph Hemmann, DB Schenker’s SVP of Global Revenue Management Air Freight, commented: “It appears right now that the expected (air) capacity is less of a challenge than initially considered. We expect vaccines to be produced throughout several months, which will rather lead to a continuous demand for capacity solutions instead of a large one-time wave. Hemmann added: “The largest challenges are expected not necessarily during the air freight transportation itself, but in the final-mile distribution. Capacity is rather critical regarding storage and last-mile solutions due to current infrastructure limitations – even in modern economies and developed countries.”
1,000 dedicated flights needed
Robert Coyle, SVP for Pharma Services at global forwarding and logistics group Kuehne + Nagel (KN), also does not expect flight capacity to be such a major problem – particularly because of the number of passenger aircraft that are not currently flying, which could potentially be brought back into service if severe air capacity restraints emerge. “We are actively having conversations with all of our relationships, to ensure that we will have enough capacity ready to go, to be able to handle this influx,” he noted. He also believes initial calculations that the vaccine transport would require something like 8,000 cargo flights were an overestimate, according to analysis by KN and the consultants that it uses. “From our estimates, as you equate the number of doses into supply chain language – especially the products that are coming out at 2-8°C – if you look at flights needed assuming the product is a 2-8°C, and if we put 70 tonnes on a freighter, you’re talking about 1,000 flights,” said Coyle. “As the knowledge of the pharma, healthcare and vaccine space starts to come out, and with more real end products – and understanding the amount of doses that can sit on a pallet – then you can start to equate: how is this going to work, and is logistics really going to be the bottleneck? Or is the ability to manufacture the volume going to be the bottleneck?” Coyle said one thing that has sometimes been misunderstood in conversations about the freight capacity needed is that the vials containing COvid-19 vaccines “can hold one dose, five doses, 10 doses, and up to 20 doses. So, if we talk about 75 million doses, which would be equivalent to what they’re estimating is needed in Canada, that sounds like a lot; but when you break that down to number of pallets, the number of doses per pallet becomes a very critical number.”
That figure varies from company to company. “One company I’m thinking about does about 136,000 doses on a pallet – so that’s 551 pallets (needed to move those 75 million doses). We do 551 pallets in minutes across our supply chain,” says Coyle. “So, from a number standpoint, we feel like we have the capacity.”
Although he doesn’t underestimate the logistics challenge of distributing the vaccines worldwide, especially in countries with less-developed cool-chain infrastructure, he calculates that in basic air freight terms or in terms of pharma logistics scale, it is achievable. And weighing up all of the logistical challenges against the capabilities available, all in all Coyle is confident that it is a challenge that can be met. To put it into context, Coyle says the total volume of Covid-19 vaccines that are forecast to be needed to be shipped by air “is less than 1% of what we (as an industry) typically do for our overall air freight, and about 10% of (total global industry-wide) pharma healthcare (volumes), from 2019 numbers”. He concluded: “This is not an instance to talk about ‘can we do it’? This is an instance to talk about how we are going to do it. And I have at my disposal pretty much every asset in this company to pull this off. So, I’m not concerned about overall capacity and commitment.”
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