The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

-70C seems pretty extreme for most facilities. Would they just store it on dry ice or something?

One interesting quote from an article on the vaccines in today's G&M:

Acuitas Therapeutics in Vancouver licenses its technology to make the tiny lipid nanoparticles that contain the RNA in the Pfizer vaccine. President and CEO Thomas Madden said the two vaccines are similar enough that Pfizer’s will likely turn out to be just as viable as Moderna’s under the same storage conditions.

If this is true, and Pfizer/BioNTech is just being super-conservative for now, this would be good news instead.

That said, some of the Ebola vaccines also require -70C, and they have been successfully distributed and delivered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, where the facilities are not nearly at the same level as here.

Yes, it was pointed out in the video as well...-70C is just the temperature that they know the vaccine will be stable at.  It is not necessarily the temperature required for it to be stable--but we don't have the time right now to test it at other temperatures.

That being said, I really have no idea how they know -70C or why Moderna knows that -20C is fine for theirs.