The first CEO of the retail unit Amazon wrote that the company is “ready to capitalize on our operations, information technology and communication skills and expertise” in vaccinating people.
Amazon.com Inc. provides assistance to the Biden administration to accelerate the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees.
In a letter Wednesday, Dave Clark, executive director of Amazon’s retail unit, congratulated President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
He reiterated a request that Amazon made last month to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, demanding that front-line workers among the more than 800,000 American employees receive vaccines at “the earliest appropriate time.”
Even much of Amazon’s white-collar workforce at its Seattle headquarters and other offices are struggling from home, the company’s warehouses, cloud-computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores have remained open due to the pandemic.
Clark said Amazon has a contract with a health care provider to administer vaccines to its units.
“We are ready to move quickly once vaccines are available,” he wrote.
Reuters reported the letter earlier Wednesday.
“In addition, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communication capabilities and expertise to support your administration’s vaccination efforts,” Clark continued.
“Our scale allows us to have a significant immediate impact” in the fight against the disease, he wrote.
In an interview with Bloomberg television earlier this month, Jay Carney, a former Biden staff member who now leads Amazon’s policy and communications teams, said the company provided assistance to officials working on the presidential transition.
“We have offered suggestions, our experiences and we are open to any ideas that the administration might have, that the administration could have received, in the way we can help,” he said.
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress over its growing power, and it’s unclear whether the Biden administration will step up control.
Since the virus began to spread in the United States, America’s second-largest private sector employer has made major adjustments to its expanded logistics network to accommodate social distancing.
However, Amazon said last year that about 20,000 of its employees tested positive for the virus in the first six months of the pandemic. Some employees, lawmakers and labor officials have criticized Amazon’s response to the crisis as insufficient.