The new executive director of Amazon’s retail unit wrote that the company is “ready to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and experience” in vaccinating people.
Amazon.com Inc. is offered to help the Biden administration speed up the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including its own employees.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the new chief executive of Amazon’s retail unit, congratulated President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
He reiterated a request Amazon made to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month calling for front-line workers from more than 800,000 U.S. employees to receive vaccines at the “right first time.”
Even most of Amazon’s corporate staff at Seattle headquarters and other offices works from home, the company’s warehouses, cloud computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores have remained open during the pandemic.
Clark said Amazon has a contract with an occupational health care provider to administer vaccines at its facilities.
“We are ready to move quickly when vaccines are available,” he wrote.
Reuters reported the letter Wednesday earlier.
“In addition, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and experience to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” Clark continued.
“Our scale allows us to have a significant impact immediately” on the fight against the disease, he wrote.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this month, Jay Carney, a former Biden member who now heads Amazon’s policy and communications teams, said the company had offered help to officials working on the transition. presidential.
“We have offered suggestions, our experiences and we are open to any idea that the administration may have, that the administration may have coming in, about how we can help,” he said.
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress for its growing power and it is unclear whether the Biden administration will intensify that control.
Since the virus began to spread across the United States, the second U.S. private sector entrepreneur has made major adjustments to its extensive logistics network to accommodate social distancing.
Still, Amazon said last year that about 20,000 of its employees had tested positive for the virus during the first six months of the pandemic. Some employees, lawmakers and officials have criticized Amazon’s response to the crisis as insufficient.