Deliveries by sky appear to be next frontier in providing healthcare to hard-to-access parts
The US government donated the Pfizer-BioNTech shots through the World Health Organization-backed Covax programme, and Ghana has turned to Zipline to make the deliveries. In total, the start-up will ferry 50,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses across nine districts of the Ashanti region — known for gold craftsmanship, cocoa, coffee and palm oil farms, a meteoritic lake, and heavy rainfall — along with other districts further north and west.
The programme is an important step in raising immunity to Covid around the world, not just in the wealthy countries that have been under fire for snapping up doses of vaccines, particularly the messenger RNA shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. While the US has pledged to donate more than 1- billion doses to poorer countries, vast populations remain without access, and companies have also been criticised for failing to make doses more widely available.
Through this partnership, we have implemented a new vaccines delivery model to ensure Covid-19 vaccines are quickly accessible across the country.Caroline Roan, Pfizer’s chief sustainability officer and senior vice-president of global health and social impact, said that the work to bring the vaccine to remote areas is just the beginning.
“We’ve always wanted to use technology as a leapfrog to ensure that all communities in the world have access to quality healthcare,” Roan said. “Drone deliveries are truly the next frontier in how we think about getting out to the communities that have been left behind.”
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