Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh receives Mellon Foundation grant for vaccine freezers

The Richard King Mellon Foundation has awarded $250,000 to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for the purchase of ultra-cold storage units – to help them hold and distribute the covid-19 vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the first doses of which were administered last week, requires storage in extremely cold temperatures – about negative 70 degrees Celsius.

“It’s fitting to end the year in this way, considering that we started back in March without any real understanding of where this was all going to end,” said Sam Reiman, foundation director, of the vaccine effort. “I’m not sure it’s really sunk in yet, for the American public, just how momentous this is.”

The foundation has given more than $33 million in 2020 to various causes aimed at fighting covid-19 and the impacts of the pandemic, according to a news release.

The grant to Children’s Hospital will go toward six storage units, a refrigeration trailer to transport the doses and a software system to track them as they’re administered.

“We are incredibly grateful to the Richard King Mellon Foundation for supporting our efforts to distribute covid-19 vaccines to our health care workers, residents of skilled nursing facilities and the patients and families we serve,” asid Dr. Terence Dermody, physician-in-chief and scientific director at Children’s.

In June, the Richard King Mellon Foundation gave $250,000 to fund vaccine trials with UPMC. The foundation also gave $250,000 to Carnegie Mellon University in October for the development of “microneedle” patches for vaccine distribution, and $117,000 to the University of Pittsburgh to combat social media misinformation about the vaccine.

Reiman said the foundation is in conversations with Excela Health to support their vaccine roll-out efforts. The foundation has tried to assist the vaccine through all of its stages, he said, from development, to addressing hesitancy for its use, to its distribution.

“There are very specific needs that all of these health care systems have as far as vaccine distribution that aren’t automatic,” Reiman said. “We have approved vaccines but that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they’re going to get to people overnight – If you don’t have the right storage, if you don’t have the right transit, if you don’t have the right software.”

Throughout the year, Reiman said the foundation has tried to be flexible in the distribution of grant funds to organizations in Southwestern Pennsylvania, focusing on developing research, economic need and educational impacts of the pandemic. There’s been “no playbook” for the foundation to balance the needs created by the pandemic with broader, systemic needs in the region.

“We pivoted within a couple of weeks, and very quickly were able to get money into the community and into the hands of organizations and individuals who needed it,” Reiman said. “We’re confident that we can continue to play that role…within the next few months in particular.”