Kickstart: The infrastructure of vaccines

If you haven't read it yet, slide over and check out Sarah Kominek's story on medical supplier ApiJect spending nearly $900 million on a vaccine packaging "Gigafactory."

This North Carolina project "will ensure America is never caught short in its ability to fill and finish vaccines and injectable medicines necessary to respond to populationwide health threats ranging from COVID-19 to any potential future bioemergencies," CEO Franco Negron said.

But that's only part of a complex supply chain that will have to be developed to bring a COVID-19 vaccine from development to actually going into use.

Our sister paper Modern Healthcare writes that there are concerns that there will be a shortage of the ultralow-temperature freezers, special gloves to handle dry ice for those freezers and the dry ice itself.

"Do I think there's not going to be enough ultralow-temperature freezers? Yeah," said Michael Wascovich, vice president of pharmacy field services for Premiere Medical Corp. "We're looking at anywhere from a three- to four-month delay."

Most of us may not have to deal with crowded office buildings right now, but our sister paper Crain's Chicago Business writes that the demands on elevators in office towers is complicating any move to get people back into offices.

"On a typical day, roughly 12 percent of a multitenant office building's population enters in a span of five minutes during peak usage time, industry experts say," reporter Danny Ecker writes. "For buildings like the 110-story Willis Tower or the 83-story Aon Center, that's roughly 1,000 or more people scrambling to get up to their offices or out to lunch right around the same time.

"Steve Hearn, whose firm owns the 100-story tower at 875 N. Michigan Ave. (formerly the John Hancock Center), says he expects to spend between $50,000 and $100,000 on 'low-hanging fruit' upgrades including adding antibacterial plastic covers to buttons on its 29 elevators, air filtration upgrades and signage and staff to help direct traffic," Ecker writes.

Lithium-ion battery maker SK Innovation has made headlines with big growth plans in Georgia, with two separate projects planned to supply automakers: A $1.67 billion plant announced in 2018 and another $960 million investment unveiled in June 2020. The plants are being built in Commerce, about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Beyond spending that money, the company also is "expanding educational opportunities" through a $60,000 donation to the Empower College and Career Center (EmpowerC3), a charter high school in Jackson County scheduled to begin operations in 2021.

Jackson County will match this funding through its Education Matching Grant and donate an additional $60,000 to Commerce City Schools (CCS).

"We hope that this donation will be of great help in providing quality education to students of EmpowerC3 and Commerce City Schools so that they can keep up their dreams and hopes for the future, despite the challenges caused by COVID-19," SK Battery America President Jun-ho Hwang said in a Nov. 19 ceremony.