Second year of COVID-19 vaccine distribution will be more challenging: UPS official

The president of UPS Healthcare suggested that the second year of distributing COVID-19 vaccines will likely be more challenging than the first.

Wes Wheeler, who leads vaccine logistics for UPS, told CNBC that “manufacturers are starting to think about how they change the formulation,” which leads to a number of issues in the company’s vaccine effort.

“When that happens, inventory becomes an issue, logistics becomes an issue and basically performance becomes an issue,” Wheeler told CNBC.

He said it is possible that more vaccines will have to be “returned or destroyed because they are not used and they are kept in storage beyond their shelf life.”

“I think that is the next phase for us, to handle that as well as we can,” he added.

He also told the business news channel that states having different plans when it comes to vaccine distribution and storage could pose additional logistical issues once vaccine doses are delivered.

Wheeler’s comments come one year after UPS and FedEx delivered the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. The two companies announced last December that it had distributed the first Pfizer-BioNTech shots after it was approved days before.

The two companies teamed up with the U.S. government to help with vaccine distribution under “Operation Warp Speed,” which was created during the Trump administration, according to CNBC.

Since the first shots were shipped, more than 594.4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been delivered nationwide, and more than 485.3 million have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

More than 72 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 60.0 percent are fully inoculated, according to the CDC.

According to CNBC, UPS and FedEx have a 99 percent on-time delivery rate when it comes to the distribution of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the U.S.

Wheeler also said the push to deliver vaccines internationally is a top priority for the company, particularly in Africa where less than 10 percent of the total population has completed their vaccination series.

“We are trying to get to the rest of the world,” Wheeler told CNBC. “We have a long way to go. We are here to help, and we want to do more.”