That’ll go well when it’ll be stuck in Kent for a fortnight.

Not going to happen in reality is it?

the NHS is good at vaccination campaigns, we’ve been doing it for years and have the processes, trained staff and reporting structures all ready to be copied across.

Just buy some shares in BOC 😉

They’ll just use the current drive-through testing centres.

I think every man and his dog had this idea, makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Restaff with Nurses / Doctors etc, do whole households in their cars, including the observation time etc. Use the resources we have in place already.

Last I heard the BMJ has negotiated £150m for GPs to do the bulk of it at GP surgeries.

What I found odd was the reported 5000 doses a day to be given – that will take years to inoculate even a proportion of the population

Yeah that would be verging on the pointless. There are around 600k clinical NHS staff, it would take over 4 months to vaccinate them alone.

For the record, the NHS vaccinated around 14m people last Autumn.

Anyway, AFAIK this Phase 1 they’re doing with the Pfizer vaccine is only going to try to minimise the second wave death toll. The sad thing is that even if it does arrive “before Christmas” it’ll be the end of Jan the first round of people will get protection from it. I suspect the Government will take the Spring/Summer natural lull to build up the logistics ready for a mass vaccination plan in Autumn.

They will claim a new system has to be set up though because Covid is special and requires a World Beating supply chain.

They’ll ignore that super-chilled transportation happens every day without anyone realising, from large trucks to small vans with a freezer bolted in the back. It’ll only be difficult to do if the govt make it difficult to do.

They will claim a new system has to be set up though because Covid is special and requires a World Beating supply chain.

They’ll ignore that super-chilled transportation happens every day without anyone realising, from large trucks to small vans with a freezer bolted in the back. It’ll only be difficult to do if the govt make it difficult to do.

Is that right? When I worked in a supermarket our freezer ran at about -40c (that was 20 years ago mind).

Is that right? When I worked in a supermarket our freezer ran at about -40c (that was 20 years ago mind).

Apparently so, several people who work in that field have posted on the thread already.

A lot of GP surgeries are not designed to cope with the large throughput of socially-distanced patients which would be required, or at least they couldn’t do that and still help everyone else they need to.

Mass vaccination sites are the way forward, drive through preferably. I think Easter Road Stadium got set up for flu jabs in Edinburgh, and, from what I hear, worked pretty well.

-80 is a funny place to be in terms of thermodynamics and economics, the GM coolers I referred to above work at 20K and 80K (ie -253c and -193C) eg 20k is liquid hydrogenish, 80k is around liquid nitrogen temp.
-80c is co2 (which is solid and sublimates to gas, no liquid phase)
However for safety the -80c may well be cooled to -193c anyway as you normally go below your min safety temp depending on insulation/time etc – eg if you get stuff on dry ice, -80c is not your safety temp, its probs only -40. And as its piss easy to get to -193c because of liquid nitrogen it would not suprise me if thats what they cool it at.
So the issue of warmer temps = better may well be moot.
(I’m an accountant not a physicist, but I used to work in research depts and learned a lot about why we had -193c coolers rather than -120c which was the max temp we needed)

Is that right? When I worked in a supermarket our freezer ran at about -40c (that was 20 years ago mind).

Loads of chemicals, gases, scientific equipment and some engineering parts and equipment have to be transported every day under specific temperature and climate conditions. You just don’t notice it as it’s mainly done in vehicles that just say BOC or NHS on the side. While the likes of supermarkets have to keep food under a certain temperature and regularly transport it using temps of -20 or more some specialist stuff needs to be moved at a highly defined temperature, humidity or pressure. There is a huge industry built up around doing exactly that. You just don’t think about it so you don’t see it. I only know about it’s scale from having contact with it through my old job, which was another job people don’t think about or see even though it’s in plain view. I used to deliver cash to banks, shops etc and the amount of times I had to explain what the van I drove looked like, despite it being armoured, liveried and usually parked outside a shop or bank, was unreal. I occasionally had to accompany deliveries of cryogenic samples to testing sites, universities or research laboratories as they needed someone with the correct SIA license present for insurance reasons. Experimental drug worth £10m+ going to a test station? Plain white van with a super-chiller in the back and me and the driver up front. Looked like we were delivering white goods to anyone else.

The infrastructure is there like it was for Test and Trace. But Covid is special so a totally new and untested system is obviously needed.

Loads of chemicals, gases, scientific equipment and some engineering parts and equipment have to be transported every day under specific temperature and climate conditions. You just don’t notice it as it’s mainly done in vehicles that just say BOC or NHS on the side. etc etc

Yeah, my ‘Bad’ I misread your post and for some reason thought you meant they could just move it around in Tesco lorries. I don’t really know why.

The cyrogenic technology is all there already. EG LNG is transported aroud the world in huge boats at -160c.
https://www.wartsila.com/encyclopedia/term/lng-tanker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier

and in a van

https://www.cryofab.com/products/Cryogenic-Storage-and-Transport-CLD-CHD-Series
More
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sigma/r0763?lang=en&region=GB

the NHS is good at vaccination campaigns, we’ve been doing it for years and have the processes, trained staff and reporting structures all ready to be copied across.

In reality the processes are dated and the reporting structures designed for a world without centrally identifiable patients. Until the system has a robust way to identify individual patients its going to be a bodge, even more so if being used outside a GP surgery – or rely largely on people knowing and being honest about what they’ve been vaccinated against. That’s not necessarily a huge problem but the UK are far from leaders in this sort of stuff. Lets face it there’s almost nothing to stop me making a GP appointment in the name of someone else who is roughly my age if I know their address and DOB (and probably don’t even need that) – unless either they or I are a regular GP visitor the docs will know no different.

-80 is a funny place to be in terms of thermodynamics and economics

its an absolutely standard thing found in most serious life science research facilities.

its an absolutely standard thing found in most serious life science research facilities.

I know that, it doesn’t make it the cheapest place to be though. Liquid nitrogen is very cheap to make. All I am saying is that the low temp requirement isn’t neccesarily an big problem that we can’t solve with exisiting tech.

Seeing as the NHS can get my wife live blood products, chilled at all times with short(ish) shelf life from USA on a monthly basis, I’m sure they’ve got the problem solving skills to make this happen.

+1 on there being other vaccines.

I dealt with cold chain plasma products from the US, it goes wrong all the time and that’s with starting material (plasma) delivered in massive batches at once.

This will be more difficult, given how the product will be packaged – especially with a no deal brexit. There’s isn’t a whole lot of validated cold chain storage floating about that is free for use and the government have not ramped this capacity up adequately.

its an absolutely standard thing found in most serious life science research facilities.

Having worked in academic labs and pharma, academic -80c freezers horrify me. Again, how many of those freezers in university labs will meet the requirements for storing licensed medicines?

I’ll place good money that come Spring 2021 there will be a scandal in full swing surrounding the delivery of the Pfizer vaccine and Boris will be out on his arse.

I know that, it doesn’t make it the cheapest place to be though. Liquid nitrogen is very cheap to make.

It’s also a nightmare in terms of handling and safety, Mr brexit voting village idiot employed on whatever hair brained scheme the government cook up will probably suffocate him or herself and half their colleagues to death using it.

I’ve worked in pharma QA far too long not to be convinced that this is going to be anything other than a gigantic cock up.

Loads of chemicals, gases, scientific equipment and some engineering parts and equipment have to be transported every day under specific temperature and climate conditions. You just don’t notice it as it’s mainly done in vehicles that just say BOC or NHS on the side.

It’s not even that sophisticated in the vast majority of cases, just DHL/FedEx etc. vans carrying nothing more sophisticated than polystyrene boxes filled with dry ice. It you want to be really fancy just add a data-logger to the package. So, yeah, you’re not going to notice it.

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/11/13/grant-shapps-rules-out-brexit-disruption-to-coronavirus-vaccine-delivery/

Don’t worry everyone, Matt Hancock and Grant Schapps say they can fly all the vaccines in with all of those cold chain transport planes that will suddenly become available to the UK and the UK only. Just like they did with those facemasks that absolutely didn’t sit on runways for days.

I understand now that temperature is the least of the worries with the vaccine.

Licensing laws are effecting where you can get it, only certain people can give the vaccine, the vaccine has to be transported, stored in a very specific manor or it becomes unusable

What I found odd was the reported 5000 doses a day to be given – that will take years to inoculate even a proportion of the population

Why is that odd its arithmetic.
60,000,000 / 5000 = 12,000 days
12,000 / 365 ~= 33 years
2 years=> 2*(1/33) ~= 1 /16 of the population.

60,000,000 / 5000 = 12,000 days

But there’s no way that 60 million are getting the vaccination anyway so all those numbers are a bit pointless.

makes perfect sense doesn’t it?

to have a group of people going to a site who potentially have the disease alongside another group of ( vulnerable) folk who you’re trying to vaccinate against that same disease?

yes, I can’t see how that would be an issue at all…

I read the 5000/day being per site. Plus 300/day per GP surgery. Threes a lot of poor quality reporting around these numbers.

But there’s no way that 60 million are getting the vaccination anyway so all those numbers are a bit pointless.

I wouldn’t say no-way.

All we know at the moment is that the UK is planning to vaccinate 20 million people with this first one.

If they manage to do that, it will reduce the number of admissions and deaths to a very manageable figure.

They’ve probably got a couple of plans on the table after that. My personal opinion is the cheapest, most efficient way, and frankly the right thing to do is to at least attempt to vaccinate every willing soul in the UK as quickly as possible in an attempt to eradicate it here.

The problem I think is that Boris seems unable to accept harsh realities, he may think that if he stopped the elderly from dying and gets deaths down to a couple a day, the rest of us will just got back to life as normal and we’ll accept rare cases of long-covid and the occasional early death and short, nasty illnesses and maybe just maybe the virus will mutate to be less deadly, he’s the worst kind of “it’ll be alright on the night” types.

My personal opinion is the cheapest, most efficient way, and frankly the right thing to do is to at least attempt to vaccinate every willing soul in the UK as quickly as possible in an attempt to eradicate it here.

TiRed has been making it clear since very early on that eradication is a very unlikely situation.

My personal opinion is the cheapest, most efficient way, and frankly the right thing to do is to at least attempt to vaccinate every willing soul in the UK as quickly as possible in an attempt to eradicate it here.

In the same way that flu (that also kills a large number of people every year) is vaccinated against now?

makes perfect sense doesn’t it?

to have a group of people going to a site who potentially have the disease alongside another group of ( vulnerable) folk who you’re trying to vaccinate against that same disease?

yes, I can’t see how that would be an issue at all…

Don’t worry, they won’t be turfing out the Carehome and Nursing home residents to the testing centres, my Wife and her District Nurse colleagues will be administering those in-house.

I’m talking about the proposed/potential mass vaccination of the population afterwards. The testing centres were the perfect location IMHO facilities that were build and designed from the very outset to avoid transmission of the very virus staffed by people who will be by then, vaccinated themselves.

But it seems, on the face of it anyway, the BMJ want it do in GP surgeries, because god knows why, but £150m for them to work weekends is probably part of it, but in mu opinion, it would be more efficient to do it at the centres when you can have a far greater throughput and it doesn’t need to be done by a Doctor, Nurses and Pharmacists already administer vaccinations.

In the same way that flu (that also kills a large number of people every year) is vaccinated against now?

No.

We don’t vaccinate for flu that way.

I wouldn’t worry about any imported vaccine, it’ll be stuck in traffic jams and never arrive in a usable state. Just remind those who voted for Brexit of the fact.

Cougar
Full Member

That’ll go well when it’ll be stuck in Kent for a fortnight.

People keep saying that but it’s a bit of nonsense, specific vehicles can be expedited and even if Kent’s infrasatructure pretty much totally collapses at times- which seems reasonably likely- there are other ports and other ways to get stuff into the country. Some geezer invented air travel.

It’s a ridiculous situation but this isn’t really that relevant to it.

Had the ‘ordinary’ flu jab recently. Drove upto to the the first gazebo and gave them my invite letter , drove to the next gazebo, arm out , jab, drove out. All within about 2 minutes without getting out the car. Quicker than a McDonalds drive thru.

In the same way that flu (that also kills a large number of people every year) is vaccinated against now?

Flu and CV2 are poor comparisons.

There’s no such thing as ‘the’ flu, there are different strains and the vaccination is basically an educated guess as to what they think might flare up in the coming year. It’s simply not practical to vaccinate the entire population annually based on best guess.

Also the incubation period of influenza is two days, for Covid-19 it’s up to two weeks. If you have flu you’re far more likely to be in bed with a hot toddy and a pot of horse liniment instead of wandering around giving it to everyone else than you would be if you were carrying CV2. There’s less of a pressing need to vaccinate for the flu.

I don’t understand why people still don’t seem to get this. The reason CV2 is so dangerous isn’t because of Covid-19 death rates, it’s because you can be a carrier for a fortnight spreading it to all and sundry and have no idea that you’re doing it.

People keep saying that but it’s a bit of nonsense, specific vehicles can be expedited and even if Kent’s infrasatructure pretty much totally collapses at times- which seems reasonably likely- there are other ports and other ways to get stuff into the country. Some geezer invented air travel.

It’s a ridiculous situation but this isn’t really that relevant to it.

So vaccine suppliers and distributors are idiots for being worried then?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54908129

there are other ports

like Felixstowe https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54908129

ahh FFS I need to type quicker

the vaccine has to be transported, stored in a very specific manor or it becomes unusable

Yeah, there can’t be too many of them with a -80 degC fridge. 😁

stevie750
Full Member

like Felixstowe https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54908129

Like literally anywhere you can park a small ocean going ferry, or crane refrigerated containers off a deck. Hell, hire the Isle of Arran and deliver it to Gourock. There’s any number of ways around it, all of them more expensive and all of them more hassle and all of them cut into the refrigerated lifespans, they’re not good options. But they’d get the job done.

Of course, what you want is for it to be a simple bit of business-as-usual. But if we decide to blow up our business-as-usual for no good reason, as it seems we’re intent on doing, and lose all the good options, that just means we have to resort to bad ones, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

No.

We don’t vaccinate for flu that way.

Exactly…. that’s what I mean. Flu isn’t vaccinated population-wide because it’s not AS dangerous to the “younger” part of the population so it’s not worth vaccinating them. “Young” people get the flu, recover and have some immunity until the next mutation.
The same can be said of CV – the younger population (i.e. <50yo) is [generally] not affected as much and therefore doesn’t cause the hospitals to overflow. There’s diminishing returns on vaccinating younger people.

So we’ve established that

1. There are plenty of ways to store and transport at -80c
2. The mass scale vaccination capability exists across the NHS and its private sector contractors (GPs, pharmacies)
3. Just do not, whatever you do, give it to Dido Harding to run it…

So it’s going to be an unmitigated disaster roaring success then..!

3. Just do not, whatever you do, give it to Dido Harding to run it…

I think that’s key, regardless of 1 and 2

Oh yeah they could easily muck it up…

Interesting read here about the challenges facing worldwide distribution

1. There are plenty of ways to store and transport at -80c

Yes, there are plenty of ways. However, hpw many companies with spare capacity are there who are approved by Pfizer to distribute their products or who are compliant with pharmaceutical GDP regulations? The answer is less than you might think.

Again, Amazon aren’t going to be distributing vaccines any time soon.