Pandemic proofing the world the UPS way, one shipment at a time

 Pandemic proofing the world the UPS way, one shipment at a time

Wes Wheeler, who led a team at UPS, recalls the planning and teamwork of delivering Covid vaccine when the world needed it most and how UPS Healthcare is building its cold chain capabilities for the future to safely deliver biologically derived, temperature-controlled drugs and therapies.

Paving the way forward for more tech-enabled healthcare solutions to deliver critical healthcare shipments in the future, UPS, the 114-year-old American shipping and supply chain management giant, has been at the forefront of delivering vaccines to combat the deadly Coronavirus through its global healthcare and life sciences arm UPS Healthcare. Known as one of the world’s largest package delivery companies, UPS clocked $84.6 billion dollars in revenue recorded for the year 2020 alone.

After being involved in early testing, sourcing PPE kits and other medical gears to ensuring that vaccines reach in a timely and safe manner to Americans last year, today the company is busy shipping Covid-19 vaccines out of the US into more than 100 countries around the world.

With the acquisition of Marken, a clinical supply chain specialist company, in 2016, UPS underscored its commitment to the healthcare and pharma industries. Five years later, right at the beginning of 2020, just a few weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic was officially declared a pandemic, UPS officially launched the UPS Healthcare division.

In an exclusive interview with The STAT Trade Times, Wes Wheeler, President of UPS Healthcare, unpacks how the pandemic catapulted the company right into the centre of the pandemic and the early lessons he learned from being involved in the many stages of delivering critical shipments like vaccines in America and to other countries. 

Paving the way for vaccine rollout in the USA

Armed with over 40 years of experience in clinical trials, pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device industries, Wheeler came on board UPS last January to spearhead UPS’s strategic healthcare growth and technology initiatives.

Incidentally, Wheeler represented UPS in the former US President Donald Trump’s task force for testing and the council for reopening the country, including Project Air Bridge, with several flights per day bringing personal protective equipment from Asia into the United States in the early part of 2020. 

“That was our first challenge given to us by the US government under Project Air Bridge. We were to work with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), our emergency management administration to bring PPE and ventilators, masks, gloves and kits to the US as fast as possible from places like China. We ended up bringing 24 million pounds of PPE on 220 charter aircraft, most of those were B747 freighters, via different gateway airports of the USA. One of the national stockpile locations for the PPE was our own location in Kentucky. I think we had close to 36 million pieces of inventory at one point,” he recalls.