Amazon’s headquarters is almost empty on March 10, 2020 in downtown Seattle, Washington. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon recommended that all employees in its Seattle office work from home, leaving much of the city center almost uninhabited.
John Moore | Getty Images
Amazon is opening a pop-up clinic in Seattle to administer Covid-19 vaccines.
The one-day clinic will be set up Sunday at the Amazon headquarters in downtown Seattle, the company announced Thursday at a news conference with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
“The truth is that Covid-19 was a tragedy for the country, for the world and for Washington,” Amazon spokesman Jay Carney told a news conference. “We are eager to help save lives here in our home state, rebuild the economy with you and turn the page on Covid as soon as we can.”
The clinic, which is being launched in partnership with Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, aims to administer 2,000 vaccines to eligible members of the public. Amazon provides space for vaccine administration as well as logistics assistance, an Amazon spokesman said.
Currently, the state of Washington allows people aged 65 and over, as well as people aged 50 and over living in a multigenerational household, to receive the vaccine.
Beyond the pop-up clinic, Carney said Amazon is working with Inslee and the state on its Covid-19 vaccination efforts. Amazon’s leadership is part of the Washington Vaccine Command and Coordination Center, a public-private partnership between the state and several other companies, including Starbucks and Microsoft, that aims to boost vaccinations against Covid-19.
The clinic comes as Amazon has appealed to President Joe Biden and other officials for its front-line workers to get priority access to the Covid-19 vaccine. The company wrote to Biden on Wednesday offering its operations, information technology and communications expertise to help with national vaccination efforts.
Carney said Amazon is ready to start administering vaccines to front-line workers once the doses are available. He added that the company has intensified coronavirus testing in its warehouses, after performing “over a million tests” at 650 locations in the United States.