Developing a safe and effective vaccine -- fundamentally hard. Developing a nuclear weapon -- fundamentally hard. Developing a quantum computer -- fundamentally hard.
Shipping something cold at a large scale? Hard, but not fundamentally hard. We'll solve it. There's no fucking way the vaccine effort is stopped by refrigeration needs.
That’s what’s incorrect. Yes, it’s not “put a man on the moon hard”, but you’re really underestimating how difficult it is.
I’ve worked in drug distribution for a few years and you’d be surprised the challenges to getting a room temperature drug to a patient in a developed country. None of the steps are hard, but when you introduce humans into the mix things go poorly pretty quickly.
Getting a -80C drug transported to a 2nd tier city in sub-Saharan Africa is not “easy”. Unless you’re willing to have half (or more) of your product spoil. Based on the demand and urgency for a vaccine for Covid, we can’t spare even 1 dose to spoilage.
Yes, it’s not a “we can’t figure this out” problem, but it’s a big enough problem to really bottleneck distribution. It’s going to take some pretty smart logistics people to make sure the process works all the way from Pfizer’s distribution center to the patient’s body.