Innovation in Medicine Delivery

Today’s complex healthcare challenges require sustainable solutions to strengthen health systems and drive progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We believe that better health is possible for everyone, everywhere, but to achieve that vision, we must bridge the gaps that limit patient access in under-resourced communities.

Pfizer Inc. and The Pfizer Foundation* are partnering with Zipline—an end-to-end logistics company—to help increase vaccine delivery and enable equitable access to critical treatments.

Delivering Essential Health Products in Ghana

In 2019, Pfizer Inc. announced an innovative four-year agreement with Zipline to use the power of drone technology to expand access to care, reach medically underserved communities, and strengthen health systems.

Together with Zipline and other partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gavi Alliance, and the UPS Foundation, Pfizer supported the Government of Ghana in establishing a medical drone delivery system to ensure access to crucial health products in some of the nation’s most rural areas.

Through the power of public-private partnerships like this, Zipline’s drones are now delivering nearly 150 essential medicine products—including blood, emergency and routine vaccines, and emergency and essential medicines—to reach an estimated 2,000-2,500 health facilities and 15 million people living in rural Ghana.

This delivery system enables Pfizer and partners to use real-time data to increase supply chain efficiencies for essential, high-volume stocked medicines and medical products, and provide “just-in-time” availability for emergency products.

In 2021, Zipline and Pfizer launched a pioneering drone delivery program in Ghana, providing thousands of doses of the Pfizer and other mRNA Covid vaccines to the hardest-to-reach corners of the country. This was made possible through the Pfizer/Zipline end-to-end cold chain project where Pfizer packaging and cold chain experts worked with Zipline to test and validate the end-to-end vaccine delivery under strict temperature requirements at national scale.

Since the program’s launch, Zipline has significantly expanded vaccine deliveries in Ghana from 150,000 doses of Pfizer mRNA vaccines in April 2022 to more than 3.5 million Covid mRNA vaccine doses from various manufacturers as of February 2024.

Kenya, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Rwanda have also built on this approach to launch a Zipline vaccine delivery model, which includes routine vaccinations in addition to all Covid-19 vaccines.

Helping to Close the Gap for Zero-Dose Children in Nigeria

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant decline in routine immunizations worldwide. Nigeria now has the highest number of zero-dose children in Africa, with over 2.25 million having never received a single vaccination.ⁱ This leaves these children especially vulnerable to some of the world’s deadliest diseases.

The Pfizer Foundation has committed $1 million, with funding from additional partners, to support Zipline in expanding vaccine access in Nigeria's Kaduna, Cross River, and Bayelsa states by utilizing their drone delivery technology and training and equipping community health workers to deliver care in zero-dose clusters. Deliveries also include other critical health supplies, such as nutritional supplementation, malaria testing and treatment, and fluids and medicines for basic maternal care.

The project is expected to deliver more than 1.3 million doses of routine vaccines to fully immunize an estimated 70,000 zero-dose children and aligns with Nigeria’s National Programme on Immunization—helping protect children from deadly diseases and providing other essential health services.

*The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organization established by Pfizer Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.

ⁱWHO and Unicef. 2021. WHO/UNICEF estimates of national immunization coverage, 2020 revision