'We're ready': Schiphol airport gears up for chilled vaccine cargos

In cavernous cold-storage warehouses at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, KLM workers are gearing up for a surge next year in COVID-19 vaccine cargos that will need to be flown around the world at ultra-low temperatures. A major hub for pharmaceutical products, Schiphol has already handled some of the vaccines being used in trials and KLM’s boss is confident its “cold chain” operations will cope with the influx of cargos as mass inoculations start in earnest. “The short and sweet of it is, yes, we’re ready,” KLM CE Pieter Elbers said. “Obviously both for societies and our industry it’s of paramount importance to have these vaccines distributed at the quickest possible pace.” While no COVID-19 vaccine has yet been approved by US or European regulators, the shot developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is the most advanced in the process and could be ready for rapid production and distribution next month. But it needs to be stored and shipped at minus 70 degrees Celsius while Moderna’s candidate has to be kept at -20C, at least until the drugs have reached their destinations where they can survive in normal fridges for short periods. “Schiphol will, for sure, be one of the major airports for the vaccines,” said Marcel Kuijn, global head of pharmaceutical logistics for Air France-KLM Cargo. “Our market share on the routes we fly is 10% to 20%, that’s in our regular pharma business, so we expect to get at least that part of the vaccine distribution,” he said.<br/>