You can enable subtitles (captions) in the video player
Before long, we should have one, and possibly even two, coronavirus vaccines approved for use in the US.
That we expect by the end of December to have enough vaccine to vaccinate those who are most vulnerable, just by way of sizing and scaling. That by the end of January we think we would have enough to vaccinate our senior citizens, as well as our healthcare workers and first responders.
The federal government, state health departments, and private companies are all making their plans for how to make and distribute hundreds of millions of doses, many of which will have to be stored at conditions colder than an Arctic winter.
So how will this new supply chain work? Well, first of all, the manufacturer will make the vaccine in their factory. It will then get packaged up and sent probably via a large shipping company such as UPS or FedEx.
If this is the Pfizer vaccine we're talking about here, it will need to be stored at conditions of minus 70 degrees Celsius. That will probably require being packed in dry ice and being monitored in real time throughout the journey to make sure those conditions don't change.
If there is a delay during the journey - let's say there's bad weather, for example - then companies such as UPS and FedEx have built vast freezer farms - row upon row of ultra-cold storage unit - just in case they need to hold those doses for any period of time.
Then once the doses get to the state level that's when the real challenges start. It's one thing for a large urban hospital to hold a single shipment of 975 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but entirely another for a smaller rural hospital to do so.
Some states have invested in their own ultra-cold distribution network so that they can hold the vaccine at certain conditions while they ship it around from one place to another. Others may simply have to rely on different vaccines altogether, which require less specific handling.
Even then the challenges don't stop. Once an injection has been administered, recipients will have to be monitored closely. Not just to check how they react to it, but also to make sure they get any booster vaccine that's required even if they've moved house, and even state, in the intervening period.
Joe Biden has promised to restore competent government to the federal level after a turbulent last few years. This will be the first, and possibly hardest, test of that.