DHL GLOBAL FORWARDING DELIVERS COVID-19 VACCINES TO MORE THAN 20 PROVINCES IN INDONESIA

The company established vaccine delivery covering 24 locations all across Indonesia living up to the company’s purpose, Connecting People. Improving Lives.

Indonesia, home to over 270 million people spread over some 6,000 inhabited islands, faces a logistical challenge ensuring Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines are delivered in a timely and safe manner including to those in the remote areas. DHL Global Forwarding, the freight specialist arm of Deutsche Post DHL Group, has been engaged to run over 17 chartered flights to 24 destinations to locations where passenger flights are not presently operational, or have insufficient capacity.

“With COVID-19, domestic travel has significantly declined, leading to a corresponding cancellation or suspension of passenger flights. The lack of freight space required a solution. Working with our airline and last mile delivery partners, DHL Global Forwarding in close coordination with Pfizer and support from the Indonesian government, arranged the necessary chartered flights to ensure this precious cargo gets delivered in a manner that preserves the integrity of the cold chain,” said Vincent Yong, President Director, DHL Global Forwarding Indonesia.

To reach provinces outside of Java island, it became clear that existing airfreight capacity had significantly dwindled given the drop in passenger traffic in the past year. DHL Global Forwarding stepped in to organize charters – ensuring the necessary regulatory approvals to deliver the vaccines across the diverse locations.

“Aircraft have limitations on the amount of dry ice that can be carried on board. This is a combination of the design of different types of aircraft, manufacturer guidelines as well as regulatory approvals. DHL appreciate the support and assistance from the Ministry of Health, BPOM and Customs in expediting our vaccines delivery to the provinces,” said Yong. “To move the vaccine shipments packed with the required dry ice involved highly detailed planning: from providing high standard vehicle that meet vaccine distribution requirements to ensuring safety and security protocols are in place to guarantee the smooth process of vaccine delivery within the assigned timeline.”

One of the key challenges faced in the shipment of the COVID-19 vaccine is the stringent temperature requirements. The vaccines are delivered in specially designed thermal shipper packaging customized by Pfizer. Each shipment was packed with dry ice to regulate the temperature, enabling its use in locations that lack the physical infrastructure to maintain the required temperature otherwise. Temperature trackers equipped with sophisticated GPS technology are also packed within each thermal shipper box to provide full visibility throughout the shipment’s entire journey.

“DHL has safely delivered 1.4 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to 168 countries, playing a key role in the global vaccination roll-out. Around 10 billion vaccine doses will be required worldwide by the end of 2021 to reach high levels of immunization,” said Thomas Tieber, CEO, DHL Global Forwarding South East Asia. “It is necessary to ensure that as many people as possible have access to vaccines. We have an advantage with a sophisticated network and the necessary healthcare expertise, we will continue to do our part and help make a difference to lives and livelihoods in the communities we operate in.”

More than 9,000 life sciences and healthcare specialists work across DHL’s dedicated global network so that pharmaceutical, medical devices, clinical trials and research organisations, wholesalers and distributors, as well as hospitals and healthcare providers are connected across the value chain and through digitalisation, from clinical trials to point of care, and every step in between.

DHL’s portfolio for the healthcare industry includes 150+ pharmacists, 20+ clinical trials depots, 100+ certified stations, 160+ GDP-qualified warehouses, 15+ GMP-certified sites, 135+ medical express sites, and a time-definite international express network covering over 220 countries and territories.

On a global scale, logistics providers are challenged to establish medical supply chain rapidly to deliver vaccines of unprecedented amount of more than 10 billion doses worldwide—also in regions with less developed logistics infrastructures, where approximately 3 billion people live. To provide global coverage over the next two years, DHL estimated in its 2020 vaccine logistics whitepaper that up to 200,000 pallet shippers and 15 million cooling boxes as well as 15,000 flights will be required across the various supply chain setups. In its whitepaper launched this year “Revisiting Pandemic Resilience”, DHL also estimated that from 2022 onward, a further 7-9 billion vaccine doses are necessary annually to keep (re-)infection rates low and slow down the pace of virus mutations.