Earlier this week, a fleet of drones hummed over Ghana’s Ashanti region toward the central Bosomtwe District, where they dropped packages of precious cargo: vials of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
The drones are carrying thousands of shots developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech to some of Ghana’s most remote countryside as part of an effort to boost access to immunizations that have to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures.
“When you go outside the city, you get to places where delivering can be a nightmare,” Daniel Marfo, Zipline’s senior vice president for Africa, said in an interview. “That is the real last mile: places where road accessibility is terrible, where changing weather conditions can cut communities off, where river bodies or lakes separate people from the mainland.”
The U.S. government donated the Pfizer-BioNTech shots through the World Health Organization-backed Covax program, and Ghana has turned to Zipline, a California-based drone delivery company, to carry the freight. In total, the startup will ferry 50,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses around Ghana.
The program is an important step in raising immunity to Covid around the world, not just in the wealthy countries that have have been under fire for snapping up doses of vaccines. While the U.S. has pledged to donate more than 1 billion doses to poorer countries, vast populations remain without access, and companies have also been criticized for failing to make doses more widely available.
To date, Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered 2 billion doses of the vaccine worldwide, and one-third have gone to low- and middle-income countries. The vaccine partners have committed to distributing 2 billion to such nations by the end of 2022, and Zipline will be a part of that effort.
Pfizer’s collaboration with Zipline dates back to 2019, when the companies began working together to bring other essential medicines to hard-to-reach communities. Caroline Roan, Pfizer’s chief sustainability officer and senior vice president of global health and social impact, said in an interview that the work to bring Covid vaccines to remote areas is just beginning.
“Pardon the pun,” she said. “But I think the sky is the limit.”—Riley Griffin
