Covid Vaccines and Global Cooperation

     Everyone knows that developing a safe and effective vaccine for the recent Covid virus has been THE question. How will it be produced? How quickly can it be produced? Is it safe? And if so, will people even get vaccinated? But there are other major questions that need to be asked too. Producing the vaccine is not the only thing we need in order to get it out to the public. The glass vials and syringes the vaccine is in need to be mass produced and able to withstand the needs of the vaccine at such extremely low temperatures. There also needs to be a way to store and transport these vaccines at these low temperatures. The most promising vaccines entering the final stages of testing use mRNA, with will denature unless it is kept at low temperatures as low as -80º C and -20ºC. The first question is what kind of glass can this be stored in that will not crack. A glass company in New York, Corning, can produce a new type of pharmaceutical grade glass that can withstand these temperatures. But this one company will not be enough to support the world, so they need to teach other companies in other countries how they are doing this. The next step is transporting these vials. Warehouses with large freezers are able to store these vaccines and transportation companies such as Fedex are using trucks with build in freezers to transport them. However airfare is more difficult because large amounts of dry ice are needed to keep the vials cold, which can be dangerous if seeped out at such high altitudes. This leaves poorer counties without the availability of large scale freezers and without imports from airfare out of the loop. And as we said, this pandemic will not get fixed until we all can get vaccinated. Another inequality is that according to the New York Times, at least 69 countries have banned or restricted the export of medical devices in order to conserve them for their own countries needs. This is leaving poorer countries without the availability to produce or buy these materials to fend for themselves.  There needs to be stations set up in these counties like Elon Musks "micro-factories", which could be set up in countries around the world to produce billions of doses of the vaccines. Of course these micro-factories would need to be accompanied with the materials, storage, transportation freezers, and professionals to go with them. The main point of all of this is that not only is this going to take time and money, but it will take global cooperation as well. Not only by sharing potential vaccines, but all of the materials that come with it, especially to the countries who don't have the ability to get these things on their own. Because the world is so integrated now, this pandemic will not end until every county has access to these things. That is the question we need to be asking, how are we going to help every country get vaccinated? That is the most important factor to ending this pandemic all together.