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Home > Maine Things Considered > Maine Agencies, Hospitals, Colleges Team Up To Secure Enough Ultracold Storage For COVID-19 Vaccine
Podcast: Maine Things Considered
Episode:

Maine Agencies, Hospitals, Colleges Team Up To Secure Enough Ultracold Storage For COVID-19 Vaccine
Category: Government & Organizations
Duration: 00:04:20
Publish Date: 2020-12-15 21:33:23
Description: As COVID-19 vaccines begin to arrive in Maine, one challenge facing health care providers is storage. Pfizer’s vaccine must be kept refrigerated at -70 C. Health care organizations, state agencies and universities are working together to acquire enough ultracold freezers to hold and distribute tens of thousands of doses across the state. When Bates College Professor Brett Huggett listened to a Maine CDC briefing in early November, he heard the agency’s director, Dr. Nirav Shah, say that the state was in need of more ultracold storage in order to hold thousands of doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. “We have several of those units at Bates College, and I thought it’d be an excellent opportunity for us to help out the community by possibly lending one of these freezers, or more, to some of the local hospitals,” he says. Huggett reached out to university administrators, who agreed. They surveyed the school and identified several large units that could be used. Two were shipped off to
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