COVID-19 vaccines are about to be the hottest commodity on earth. How do we keep them safe?

Fearing the guard would raise the alarm if left untended, the four masked gunmen tried first to tear a white doctor's gown into strips to tie him up, but the material was too tough. Then they tried a belt. Too short.

Finally, like Goldilocks gone bad, they found an option that was just right, chucking the man into a cage with 500 rhesus monkeys before loading up the stolen goods they'd come for and dissolving into the darkness of a late summer night, according to an account on the front page of the Toronto Daily Star on Aug. 31, 1959.

The theft of 200,000 doses (or 75,000, depending on which story you read) of polio vaccine from the Micro-Biology and Hygiene Institute of Montreal more than six decades ago was then worth the princely sum of $50,000.

More concerning, it upended a provincial vaccination effort trying mightily to slow one of Canada's last polio epidemics; a storm that had already infected more than 500 and left 29 dead in Montreal alone. Police were sent scrambling, desperate to uncover the doses before they expired.

Why they wanted the vaccine or what they'll do with it I don't know," Dr. Lionel Fortier, an assistant director of the facility, told Star at the time.

But it will affect our whole fight against the epidemic here."

With multiple candidates racing into the final stretch - Britain became the first country to authorize a vaccine for use this week - COVID-19 vaccines are about to become one of the hottest commodities on the planet. In seeking a distribution company, Canada's government notes in its tender that doses must be trackable, and safeguarded at all times as high value assets and high value targets for criminal elements."

Around the world, everything from dummy shipments to armed escorts and elaborate GPS tracking are being floated as potential security measures.

Both polio and COVID-19 sparked the development of a brand new vaccine, says Christoper Rutter, a medical historian and professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. In 1959, a polio vaccine had existed for just four years, and was still a precious commodity - but demand for a COVID vaccine will outstrip even polio, he says.

The demand on a global scale, we haven't dealt with anything like this before," says Rutter.

When the first COVID-19 vaccine shipments hit the road, the attention will be significant," notes Chuck Forsaith, the head of the Pharmaceutical Cargo Security Coalition. Part of the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, his group was founded specifically to make the movement of vaccines and other drugs more secure, and represents manufacturers, shipping companies and other groups invested in transporting pharmaceuticals around the world.

Just by virtue of the need for them, they are going to reasonably draw more attention from illicit entities than average pharmaceutical shipments."

And while Montreal might have been an outlier in terms of scale and audacity, vaccine theft is not exactly unheard of.

In 2009, a man drove off with a refrigerated truck loaded with 930 doses of H1N1 vaccine that had been left unattended outside a Milwaukee middle school. (Officials said later they weren't sure whether he'd wanted the vaccine or the truck.) Just last month, 10,000 doses of regular flu vaccine destined for hospital patients were stolen in Mexico.

While Justin Trudeau's government has been mum on specifics, it is close to locking down a contract with a distribution company, and the military has been called into help. Last week, Maj. Gen. Dany Fortin was announced as the officer in charge of co-ordinating delivery of vaccines nationwide in what the prime minister called the greatest mobilization effort Canada has seen since the Second World War."

During a tech briefing Fortin said his team has already established a national operations centre to manage and track the distribution of vaccines from the moment they're released from the manufacturer to the point they're dropped off at delivery sites designated by the provinces and territories.

Officials have also held the first of multiple planned simulations to ensure that critical capability gaps are filled, risks are mitigated and well identified, the plan is resilient, (and) contingencies are put in place."

The vaccine makers - Health Canada officials say Pfizer is the closest to getting regulatory approval - are also thinking about security.

In a statement, a Pfizer spokesperson said the company has already been working with the department and some provinces to support distribution. Their vaccine is created using a new technology that requires storage at around -70C, give or take 10 degrees, so the company has made special thermal shipping containers that will be filled with dry ice to keep them cold.

Because of the unique challenges of transporting their vaccine, federal officials say Pfizer is the only drug maker so far that will drop off its own vaccines at provincial drop-off points, instead of letting the company contracted by the government do it.

According to Pfizer, its vaccine will be flown into Canada and put onto ground transport from there, using a flexible just-in-time system" so the frozen doses aren't left sitting. The shippers will be GPS-enabled so a central control tower can track locations and temperatures as they travel on pre-set routes so that Pfizer can proactively prevent unwanted deviations and act before they happen."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pfizer is also looking at dummy shipments in the U.S., but a spokesperson was unable to confirm whether that would be the case here in Canada.

Forsaith, who was a police officer in New Hampshire before getting into pharmaceutical security, declined to comment specifically on the tactics that will be used with COVID-19 vaccine shipments, citing security reasons. But he said he's satisfied" with the precautions being taken by companies so far, adding that groups like his have made helped spur major changes in safety in recent years.

Between refrigeration requirements, interest from criminal elements, and the critical needs of sick patients, pharmaceutical shipping isn't exactly easy even when the whole world isn't watching you, he says.

It is very complex. No manufacturer sells directly to a consumer. Pfizer sells its drugs to a distributor, the distributor sells it to a retailer and the retailer sells it to you," he said. So this is minimizing it tremendously, but there's at least four hand-offs before that drug actually makes it into your medicine chest."

According to Forsaith, the general principle behind keeping safe shipping is to keep it moving. Cargo at rest is cargo at risk," he says. Anyone handling logistics will also likely look at a map and plot routes to avoid areas considered risky.

While your average thief is not up to the challenge of keeping Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine below -70C, Forsaith says there are criminal elements out there who understand pharmaceuticals.

Maybe not necessarily domestically in the United States or domestically in Canada, but there could be desires from nation states outside of our two countries that are not necessarily currently on a vaccine distribution matrix, and would be interested in attempting to get their hands on some vaccines for themselves."

If vaccines are stolen, the consequences would be bigger than just the doses that go missing, he adds. When other temperature-sensitive drugs have been stolen in the past, he says that manufacturers have often had to track down and destroy all other product from the same batch number, since they were no longer able to vouch for the safety and efficacy of all doses in circulation.

Of course, back in 1959, the Montreal police didn't have the luxury of GPS tracking. But a few days after the doses disappeared, they got a mysterious phone call.

According to an account in the Globe and Mail, police got a call from an anonymous tipster four days later telling them they would find the vaccine in an apartment on St. Hubert Street in Montreal.

Find it they did; much of it in a refrigerator, next to a dozen bottles of beer.

That fall, a warrant was issued for 33-year-old Jean-Paul Robinson, who was reported to be a director of a convalescence home and a former medical student who claimed he'd spent the summer of 1959 running an ad hoc polio-vaccination clinic on the South Shore of Montreal, using doses he'd gotten lawfully from the province of Quebec.

According to the Montreal Gazette, Robinson was found in a shed on an isolated farm after a two-week search by police, despite his relatives' insistence that he'd been killed by a gang. Described as a pallid, thin-faced man," it was noted that when he was found he was wearing glasses, had grown a moustache and had altered" his complexion. He had completely changed his personality," the prosecutor said.

In a colourful trial beginning in 1961, Robinson styled himself a good Samaritan who, when allegedly contacted by the real vaccine thief days after the trial - a man named Bob" according to Robinson - put a plan into motion to buy the stolen vaccine from him and return it to the authorities.

He told the court that he managed to buy the doses back for $800, but before he could return them, landed himself in the hospital with what he believed to be a heart attack. (Tests revealed no major damage, his doctor testified.)

Further suspicions were aroused when it was revealed Robinson asked a nurse to store a few polio vaccines for him he'd been carrying when he arrived - he referred to them as samples" - until he got better. He had also sold a few thousand doses of polio vaccine to a druggist he knew in the days after the heist, though he said that was part of the surplus from his vaccination clinic.

I was solely interested in seeing to it that as many people as possible obtained the vaccine as quickly as possible," he told the court.

The only other person to face charges was a man named Gilles Herbert, who was about a decade younger than Robinson. He reportedly gave himself up a year after the crime and was sentenced to four years in prison.

When arrested, Herbert had named Jean-Paul Robinson as the ringleader of the crime. When called to testify against Robinson, he reportedly told the judge it was not the same Jean Paul Robinson" and was promptly charged with perjury.

Finally in 1962, a judge ruled that while Robinson's argument - that he was but a hapless agent for the police, trying to recover stolen vaccine - might sound strange and a little far-fetched, it was technically possible.

Robinson was acquitted.

Alex Boyd is a Calgary-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_n_boyd