In October 2020, before any vaccine had cleared the finish line, the biggest logistics question in America was how to keep it cold.
This post was originally published on October 27, 2020 — weeks before any COVID-19 vaccine had received emergency authorization, and months before most Americans could get a dose. Pfizer and Moderna were still finishing Phase 3 trials that fall, but the logistics industry was already racing to solve a problem it had never faced at this scale: how do you move hundreds of millions of doses of a fragile, temperature-sensitive product across the country without losing a single batch to a broken cold chain? We're republishing this piece as a snapshot of that moment, not as current medical or shipping guidance.
Two Vaccine Candidates, Two Very Different Cold-Chain Problems
The two frontrunner vaccines weren't interchangeable from a logistics standpoint. Pfizer and BioNTech's mRNA candidate needed to be stored at roughly -70°C — colder than a typical winter day in Antarctica, and far below what a standard medical freezer can hold. Moderna's candidate, by contrast, was stable at a more conventional -20°C freezer temperature and could sit in a regular refrigerator for up to 30 days. That roughly 50-degree-Celsius gap wasn't a footnote; it meant two entirely different distribution strategies, since one vaccine could ride existing pharmacy and hospital freezer infrastructure and the other essentially could not.
Dry Ice Isn't Just Packing Material — It's Regulated Cargo
To solve the ultra-cold problem, Pfizer engineered its own reusable shipping container, informally nicknamed "the pizza box," packed with dry ice and fitted with GPS-enabled thermal sensors. Each container could hold roughly 1,000 to 5,000 doses and maintain temperature for about ten days unopened; once it reached a vaccination site, the dry ice had to be replenished within 24 hours and roughly every five days after that. What often got lost in the headlines is that dry ice itself is a regulated hazardous material — as it sublimates it releases CO2 gas, which means shipments are subject to quantity limits, ventilation rules, and hazmat handling requirements, not unlike other sensitive cargo that needs specialized vapor-barrier and climate-aware packaging to survive transit intact.
Why FedEx, UPS, and DHL Became Part of the Story
Pfizer named FedEx, UPS, and DHL as its core U.S. logistics partners, planning to move product by both road and air to get doses to points of use within a day or two of leaving a distribution hub. FedEx built out a Cold Chain Center in Memphis with roughly 20,000 square feet of temperature-controlled contingency storage, and was already handling around 500,000 dry ice shipments a month even before vaccine volume arrived. UPS, for its part, was standing up a "freezer farm" in Louisville. Both carriers were central partners in the federal government's Operation Warp Speed effort — a reminder that moving something this sensitive at national scale takes purpose-built infrastructure, not just available truck space.
The Last-Mile Problem Nobody Could Fully Solve in Advance
Getting a shipment to a regional hub is one challenge; getting it the final miles to a rural clinic, small pharmacy, or local health department — many of which had no ultra-cold freezer on site and had never had to source dry ice before — was another. That gap between "arrived in the country" and "arrived in the right hands, still cold" is the classic last-mile logistics problem, and it's exactly where cold-chain plans tend to break if they aren't built with the actual endpoint in mind rather than just the warehouse.
What This Means for Businesses Shipping Something That Can't Be Damaged
To be clear, Las Vegas Crating & Logistics was not part of vaccine distribution — that work went through pharmaceutical-grade carriers operating under federal contracts. But the underlying problem in this story is one we deal with regularly on a different scale: how do you package, monitor, and route something that will be ruined if it gets too warm, too cold, jostled, or delayed? Custom crating, vapor-barrier and climate-conscious packaging, and realistic transit planning matter whether the cargo is a medical freezer, lab equipment, fine art headed to a Strip resort, or electronics that can't tolerate a temperature swing. If you're moving something temperature-sensitive or fragile and need it packaged and routed to actually survive the trip, get a quote and we'll help you plan it properly.