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Markus Kerckhoff comes from a family of pharmacists in the Bergisches Land.
Father, uncle, aunt - there have been pharmacists and medical professionals in the family for generations.
However, the 60-year-old Kerckhoff himself rarely sells pills at the counter of his two pharmacies, much more often he organizes the dispatch of vaccines.
His shipping company is one of the few in Germany that delivers vaccine to doctors nationwide at refrigerator temperature within 24 hours, including company doctors.
It reaches around 4.5 million employees.
Even a large corporation from the DAX has commissioned him with the supply of vaccines and medication for the employees.
Last year he brought a good 700,000 vaccine doses, mainly against flu, to doctors' offices and achieved a turnover of 45 million euros with his 55 employees.
In the most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Kerckhoff drives his own vehicles, in the rest of the country he uses the transport company Thermomed for this.
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In other words: Kerckhoff, a Rhinelander, has been familiar with delivering sensitive vaccines for decades.
But what is now planned or not planned by the federal government and its health minister for the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines, that gets the pharmacist's pulse racing.
Criticism also in your own interest
Because according to information from the Ministry of Health, vaccine will roll into the country in a completely different dimension in the second quarter of 2021.
"According to our calculations, around 850,000 vaccine doses could be available every day," Kerckhoff said in an interview with WELT.
But the vaccination centers in the country, which themselves only had a capacity of 200,000 vaccinations a day, would be overwhelmed with the distribution.
Kerckhoff makes no secret of the fact that he expresses this criticism in his own business interests.
From his point of view, one of the fundamental mistakes in politics over the past few months has been that the private sector has been kept out instead of directly involved.
Pharmacist and vaccine dispatcher Markus Kerckhoff
Source: Thomas Merkenich Photography
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"If we actually have such quantities in a few weeks and want to use the vaccination centers almost exclusively for this, then the vaccine will expire before it is even vaccinated," believes Kerckhoff.
Health policy must clear the way for large-scale vaccinations by doctors and, above all, company doctors.
These medics could quickly vaccinate thousands of company employees and their families.
The pharmacist demands that it is precisely these structures that politicians have to fall back on.
Medical services, authorities such as health authorities, employers' liability insurance associations or even companies with their company doctors - they have all been familiar with vaccination campaigns, such as flu vaccinations, for decades.
The criticism is primarily directed against the planned role of the vaccination centers in logistics and distribution.
“The distribution of the vaccines through these centers is a mistake,” says Kerckhoff.
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With a delivery of the vaccine to up to 50,000 medical practices and thousands of company doctors, they are overwhelmed.
Instead of bringing the vaccine doses from the 16 central warehouses across Germany to the vaccination centers and distributing them from there, it must be possible for the supplying pharmacies and wholesalers to pick them up directly there.
A different logistician in every country
“We need a paradigm shift away from a bureaucratic and towards a pragmatic way of vaccinations and a jolt among those responsible in politics,” says Kerckhoff.
He calls for "negotiating instead of ruling through".
But according to the Federal Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers, there are not even tenders for vaccine logistics to doctors' practices for individual regions, as the logistics magazine "Trans Aktuell" recently reported.
All vaccines are owned by the federal government.
After production in the pharmaceutical plant, it is stored centrally in the federal states and from there distributed to around 400 vaccination centers in the country.
There are a large number of logistics companies commissioned for this purpose: Schleswig-Holstein, for example, uses the medium-sized company Intermed, Lower Saxony and Baden-Württemberg use the Post subsidiary DHL.
In North Rhine-Westphalia it is Kuehne + Nagel, in Berlin Dachser.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt, pharmacies take on this task.
Hessen relies on the Red Cross, Brandenburg on Unitax Pharmalogistik and Bavaria in turn on Trans-o-flex.
However, all of this only affects the large quantities for centralized vaccinations.
Advice from practitioners is not required
In the upcoming "phase two", however, a broad and decentralized vaccination campaign is the goal.
However, local pharmacists and logisticians complain that the advice of local practitioners is not sought at the state or federal level.
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"I see Health Minister Jens Spahn's duty to agree on a concept for vaccinating the population," says Kerckhoff.
One way would be via pharmaceutical wholesalers and pharmacists' associations.
Above all, cooperation between the Federal Ministry of Health and the responsible state ministries would be necessary.
The vaccination centers were not even designed for a large-scale logistics task.
"I don't know of any vaccination center that has a merchandise management system that can guarantee the traceability of individual vaccination batches," says Kerckhoff.
But that is exactly what is mandatory for vaccines in general and even more so for the sensitive Covid-19 vaccines.
Each vaccine package must be serialized and made unique before it is distributed.
Documentation of the flow of goods is not possible in any other way.
The temperature must be constantly monitored
This is important for monitoring the temperature, but also for another aspect: "With this coveted product, you otherwise open the door to criminal energy," says Kerckhoff.
Similar criticism comes from logistics companies that specialize in pharmaceutical shipping.
"I do not understand why the federal government does not control vaccine distribution centrally and not organize it in the same way as the distribution of flu vaccines, for example, which has been working well for many years," said Wolfgang Albeck, CEO of Trans-o-flex, recently in the WELT conversation.
Obviously nobody in Berlin wants to burn their fingers on the subject in politics.
It should not happen that in a few weeks big differences in the supply of vaccines between individual regions would become "another scandalous topic," said Albeck.
While refrigerator temperatures of two to eight degrees Celsius are no problem for many logistics companies on long transport routes, the situation is different in the regional distribution.
Experts emphasize that the biggest problem with the fine distribution of just a few vaccine doses is maintaining the cold chain.
The monitoring and documentation of the temperature is absolutely necessary.
"The effectiveness of the vaccines will largely depend on this," says Kerckhoff.
For passive cooling, cooling packs or dry ice in correspondingly large quantities are necessary.
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Active cooling technology with their own vehicles, on the other hand, is only offered by special mail order companies.
The vaccine from Biontech has special requirements.
When thawed, it is only stable for a few hours outside the refrigerator temperature.
After that it is ineffective.
According to pharmaceutical experts, there is currently no vaccine on the German market that is so sensitive.
There is no replenishment of syringe material
The equipment with the most important vaccination accessories is also a cause for concern.
The supply of vaccine must be synchronized with the availability of syringes and needles, experts demand.
"I can only hope that the federal government has secured syringe material because there is currently no replenishment on the international market," says Kerckhoff.
He himself only received rejection of orders from major suppliers in China.
Without a replenishment of important vaccine material, even the largest amount of vaccine is of no use.
Given the dimensions of the overall mass vaccination, the costs for vaccine logistics are likely to be a minor matter.
A typical expense allowance for the fine distribution to medical practices, for example for the flu vaccination, is less than one euro for a vaccine dose for the sending pharmacies.