What Temperature Does the Pfizer Vaccine Have to Be Stored at

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Primal Takeaways

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

Inside two and a half weeks of each other, ii big-proper noun pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer (working with BioNTech) and Moderna produced viable COVID-19 vaccines that potentially signaled the starting time of the end of the pandemic.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccine candidates received emergency utilize authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Assistants (FDA) in December 2020.

They were rolled out nigh nine months after the Globe Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-xix a global public health crisis—the fastest turnaround fourth dimension in earth history.

Takeaway

The previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, took more than than iv times as long to see the calorie-free of day.

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

To put this in perspective, this is chillier than a winter'southward 24-hour interval in Antarctica.

And past contrast, the seasonal influenza vaccine has to be kept at a comparatively warm four degrees Celsius or 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Sheila Keating, PhD, associate professor of laboratory medicine at the Academy of California, San Francisco Schoolhouse of Medicine.

What This Means For You

Different temperature storage requirements for approved or authorized COVID-19 vaccines may bear upon which vaccine will be easily attainable to yous in the future.

How Will These Storage Demands Be Met?

Keating anticipates that these requirements will significantly complicate the distribution of the Pfizer vaccine. In order to ensure the efficacy of the vaccine, people will demand to be vaccinated at "centralized locations with admission to minus 80 degrees Celsius freezers" or dry ice containers, she said.

This equipment is high maintenance in and of itself. Dry water ice containers need "to be replenished regularly, and dry water ice supply may prove 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 tin comport at least 975 doses and are packed with enough dry ice "to recharge it 1 more than time," said Jessica Atwell, PhD, assistant scientist in the segmentation of global disease epidemiology and control in the department of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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

"Doing that in high-income countries like the U.Due south. is ane thing," Atwell said. "Trying to do that in low- and centre-income countries effectually the world, (with) fifty-fifty a normal two to 8 degrees Celsius, refrigerator-similar temperature, can be actually hard in many parts of the world. So information technology's definitely an implementation challenge."

Mayhap the biggest barrier to the widespread distribution of a vaccine that needs to be kept every bit cold equally Pfizer's is there's no precedent for information technology.

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

How Does Pfizer Stack Up To Its Main Competitor?

The Moderna vaccine (also known as mRNA-1273) is lower maintenance. It needs to be kept at about minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) or a range between minus 25 to minus xv Celsius (-minus thirteen to 5 Fahrenheit).

(By contrast, the storage surround of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is comparatively warm: It must exist stored at between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit).

Why Must These Vaccines Be Stored at Different Temperatures?

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

Essentially, Atwell says, the two vaccines are "lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate the messenger RNA inside" and have 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 so cold to prevent them from breaking downwardly. If they exercise, they get useless.

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

Then in other words, scientists may never know for certain.

"Information technology only comes downward to what their information is," vaccine researcher Margaret Liu tells NPR. "If their data shows that it's more stable at a certain temperature, that'southward information technology."

While drugmakers are certain to keep their secrets "shut to the vest," it's always possible that some researcher, somewhere, will unlock the mystery—and maybe remove one of the impediments of getting "shots in arms" across the land and across the globe.

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

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

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