News Room

The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator. From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

It took a month, but the Big Ten finally realized the error of its ways and announced that fall football is back on. Next weekend, the Big Ten will join the ACC, SEC and Big 12 among the power conferences who looked at the full gamut of risks and rewards in playing college football, concluding that not playing this fall carried more risks than playing.

Michigan officials to coordinate shipments to hospitals, health departments, nursing homes. Health care workers expected to receive vaccines. Four COVID-19 vaccines are in Phase 3 clinical trials, although two have paused for safety reasons. 

On Monday, Brad Bigford went through a list of patients who had signed up for a flu shot and started making cancellations. The nurse practitioner and owner of the small business Table Rock Mobile Medicine hadn’t received his complete shipment of vaccines yet for the year. He ran out of them this week.

Billions of people may have to wait for a COVID-19 vaccine because of a dearth of effective cold storage facilities. Most vaccines need to be stored, transported, and administered at consistent, cool temperatures, usually between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. But a number of trial vaccines nearing the end of clinical trials require far lower temperatures, because they are RNA vaccines — a type of vaccine that carries instructions to cells to build protein.