Vaccine rollouts to boost logistics chain

Jointown Pharmaceutical has built 31 provincial-level logistics centers and 104 city-level logistics centers. With a history of 20 years in the pharmaceutical cold chain sector, the company has 455 warehouses with good supply practice certificates, and has a total storage capacity of 105,000 cubic meters.

Its cold chain facilities also include more than 250 refrigerated vehicles, over 1,700 outsourced vehicles and more than 5,000 cold chain incubators.

Due to its recently inked strategic cooperation deal on vaccine storage and transportation with Sinovac Biotech (Hong Kong) Ltd, another subsidiary of Sinovac Biotech Ltd, Jointown has been upgrading current facilities with high standards, and plans to increase its refrigerated vehicles by 50 to 100 for vaccine distribution.

Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co Ltd, which is in a partnership with German biotech company BioNTech SE using a new technology known as messenger RNA to develop COVID-19 vaccines, said it has built cold storage facilities near Shanghai Pudong International Airport ahead of possible deployment of the vaccine on the Chinese mainland. The company has partnered with Sinopharm Group Co Ltd for future distribution of the vaccine, which needs to be kept within cold chain distribution at temperatures of－70 C. At temperatures between 2 C and 8 C, it can be stored for up to five days.

Fosun Pharma announced last month 100 million doses of its BNT162 mRNA-based vaccine candidate would be provided to the Chinese mainland this year, subject to regulatory approval, with initial supplies to be delivered from BioNTech's production facilities in Germany.