What Temperature Does Pfizer Vaccine Need to Be Stored at

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Cardinal Takeaways

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

Within two and a one-half weeks of each other, two large-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 employ dominance (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Dec 2020.

They were rolled out about nine months later on the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-nineteen a global public health crunch—the fastest turnaround fourth dimension in world history.

Takeaway

The previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, took more than four times as long to encounter the light of day.

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

To put this in perspective, this is chillier than a winter's day in Antarctica.

And past dissimilarity, 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 University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

What This Means For You

Different temperature storage requirements for approved or authorized COVID-19 vaccines may affect which vaccine will exist easily attainable to you in the time to come.

How Will These Storage Demands Exist 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 need to be vaccinated at "centralized locations with access to minus fourscore degrees Celsius freezers" or dry out ice containers, she said.

This equipment is high maintenance in and of itself. Dry water ice containers need "to be replenished regularly, and dry out ice supply may prove to be hard 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 conduct at to the lowest degree 975 doses and are packed with enough dry ice "to recharge it 1 more time," said Jessica Atwell, PhD, assistant scientist in the division of global disease epidemiology and control in the department of international wellness at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Schoolhouse of Public Health.

Nevertheless, it won't exist viable to ship them worldwide.

"Doing that in high-income countries similar the U.S. is one thing," Atwell said. "Trying to do that in low- and center-income countries around the world, (with) even a normal 2 to viii degrees Celsius, refrigerator-like temperature, can exist really difficult in many parts of the world. So it's definitely an implementation challenge."

Perhaps the biggest barrier to the widespread distribution of a vaccine that needs to exist kept every bit common cold as Pfizer's is there's no precedent for it.

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

How Does Pfizer Stack Upward To Its Main Competitor?

The Moderna vaccine (as well known every bit mRNA-1273) is lower maintenance. Information technology needs to be kept at about minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus iv Fahrenheit) or a range betwixt minus 25 to minus fifteen Celsius (-minus xiii to five Fahrenheit).

(By dissimilarity, the storage environment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is comparatively warm: It must be stored at betwixt 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit).

Why Must These Vaccines Be Stored at Unlike 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 within" and take a stabilizing consequence. She attributes the large temperature variation in their storage temperature requirements to the "sort of lipid nanoparticles that encapsulates the mRNA."

Only put, the vaccines must be kept so cold to prevent them from breaking down. If they do, they go useless.

Fifty-fifty scientists would similar to know why at that place is such a disparity betwixt the Pfizer and Moderna storage requirements. But they know the answers lie in the scientific formulations for the vaccines. And drug companies are known to baby-sit these "recipes" zealously.

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

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

While drugmakers are sure to keep their secrets "shut to the vest," it'due south e'er possible that some researcher, somewhere, will unlock the mystery—and perchance remove one of the impediments of getting "shots in arms" across the state and across the globe.

The data in this article is electric current as of the appointment listed, which ways newer information may be available when yous read this. For the virtually 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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