Coronavirus Vaccine Arrives At Chicago's O'Hare Airport

CHICAGO — Doses of the new coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer have already been flown into Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, NBC News reports. A source told the television station's Chicago affiliate on Saturday that a United Airlines cargo plane flew from Brussels, Belgium, to Chicago "with the vaccine on board."

Pfizer has three clinical research units around the world — in New Haven, Connecticut, Singapore and Brussels. The Brussels facility was one of two sites chosen to produce the company's new vaccine, in partnership with the German drugmaker BioNtech.

Pfizer submitted an application for emergency FDA approval on Nov. 20 and says phase 3 clinical trials found the vaccine — officially known as BNT162b2 — to be 95 percent effective at preventing new coronavirus infections. The company has already produced "hundreds of thousands" of doses, Pfizer told a Belgian news agency earlier this month, and it hopes to make up to 1.3 billion by the end of next year.

Illinois Department of Public Health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said last week that she expects Illinois to receive about 400,000 doses of the vaccine within 48 hours of its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If all goes well, that approval should happen within weeks.

But, according to NBC, thousands of doses may already be in Chicago, ready to distribute as soon as the approval comes through.

A spokesperson for DHL told ABC News that the shipping company would also be involved in transporting and storing the vaccine at O'Hare. The company operates a 424,000-square-foot life science and health care logistics facility at the airport, which it updated with "new alternative temperature management import and export solutions" for "temperature-sensitive shipments" in 2019, according to the website Logistics Management.

"We are able to process any pharmaceutical, biotech and medical devices that need to be in a temperature-controlled environment," the company said in a statement at the time.

That's significant because Pfizer's vaccine requires special refrigeration that is not widely available. That requirement complicates the vaccine's distribution, and health officials are still working out how to get it as quickly as possible to the state's 12.7 million residents. Ezike said the state has ordered 20 deep freezers to keep the vaccine at an ultra-cold minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than Antarctica. But it's not clear where those freezers will be located or how accessible they will be.

The FDA's committee on vaccines will meet to consider emergency use authorization for Pfizer's vaccine on Dec. 10 — just enough time for it to double-check the drug company's data, the agency said. If approved, Pfizer said it hopes to have 40 million doses of the vaccine to Americans by the end of the year.