Dispatch Smaller Vaccine ShipmentsThe Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine must be administered within five days after it leaves the main storage center and within six hours after a diluent is added before five to six doses are extracted from a vial.To cope with that short shelf life and to reach less-populated and isolated areas, Israel—with Pfizer’s approval—devised a system to split the company’s 1,000-dose packages into smaller batches of a few hundred each.
Workers repackage the vials in workstations equipped with massive freezers.Israel, like most other countries, is giving priority to medical professionals, people over 60 and those with high-risk conditions as vaccine recipients.