◼ BUSINESS Bloomberg Businessweek March 8, 202116
ILLUSTRATION BY LIA KANTROWITZ. DATA: ASIA VIDEO INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION/YOUGOV SURVEYS CONDUCTED IN AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER 2019● Shippers are using kill switches, armed guards,
and spycraft worthy of 007 to ensure deliveryProtecting Vaccines,
James Bond-Style
Billions of doses of coronavirus vaccines will be
dispatched in the coming months via truck, plane,
ship, and rail to hospitals, clinics, and pharma-
cies around the world. With that cargo worth tens
of billions of dollars—and some individual ship-
ments valued at as much as $70 million—one thing
is certain: Crooks will try to steal some of it. For
freight haulers, the vaccine rollout poses “the
biggest security challenge in a generation,” says
Thorsten Neumann, chief executive officer of the
European arm of the Transported Asset Protection
Association, an industry group representing com-
panies that carry precious goods.
Interpol in December issued an orange alert
notice warning that it expects a dramatic increase
in armed robberies of the shipments, as well as van-
dalism by anti-vaccine militants. And if the profitable
black markets for drugs treating, say, cancer and
arthritis are any guide, it won’t be hard for thieves
to unload their loot; on the dark web, Covid-19 vac-
cines of unknown authenticity are already selling for$200 per dose. That’s spurred freight companies to
adapt a playbook developed to fight the $40 billion
in theft from shippers every year of goods such as
5G handsets, $500 sneakers, and $5,000 handbags—
employing methods ranging from added manpower
to newfangled digital spycraft worthy of 007.
The pandemic has already sparked an upswing
in thefts of related products. Last year millions
of respiratory masks were taken from an aviation
facility in Kenya, medical gloves worth $1 mil-
lion were pillaged from a container in Florida,
and almost 200 respirators headed for Colombia
were stolen. Even toilet paper has been targeted:
During 2020’s panic-buying frenzy, 130,000 rolls
were lifted from trailers in the U.K.
Dutch shipping company H. Essers, which fre-
quently transports sensitive cargo such as cash and
fine art, has selected its most experienced work-
ers to haul the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine across
Europe. Those 250 drivers have been with Essers
for an average of a decade, but they’ll all go through