Amazon is one of the largest companies in the country – and despite its flaws and shortcomings, the company generally excels in logistics and on a large scale. Therefore, Amazon suggests, the brand new Biden administration should give the company a call to sharpen COVID-19 distribution nationwide.
“Amazon is ready to help you reach your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your government,” Dave Clark, head of Amazon’s consumer business, said in a letter Wednesday (PDF) ) written to President Joe Biden.
Amazon’s more than 800,000 employees need to be vaccinated as soon as possible, Clark noted, as individuals working in Amazon warehouses, AWS data centers and Whole Foods stores are essential workers who are not away from home. can not work. The company has entered into an agreement with a third-party healthcare firm to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon facilities, Clark added – if only they could get vaccines to administer.
“We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available,” Clark wrote. “In addition, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts. Our scale enables us to immediately make a significant impact in the fight against COVID-19, and we are ready to help you in this endeavor. ‘
A bad failure
There are two COVID-19 vaccines currently approved in the United States: one from Pfizer / BoiNTech and one from Moderna. Federal regulators gave permission for both to be distributed and used more than a month ago in mid-December, but the rollout was, to say the least, rocky.
A week after the Pfizer vaccine became available, state leaders complained that they had not received the doses promised by the federal government. The Trump administration blamed the manufacturers, but Pfizer issued a statement at the time stating that he had millions of doses in a warehouse ready to sit down, but received no instructions from the federal government to which they should be sent. not.
Before the end of December, the Trump administration signed an agreement with Pfizer for an additional 100 million doses of the vaccine, bringing the total number of doses the US had in both producers to about 400 million. Making these doses work, however, remains challenging, and last week The Washington Post reported that the vaccine supply, which is intended to guarantee a second-dose reserve, has already bled dry.
“The deployment of vaccines in the United States has so far been a sad failure,” President Joe Biden said in a speech five days before he was sworn in. He promised to do everything in his power to accelerate the distribution of vaccines during his administration, with the stated goal of reaching 100 million doses administered in the first 100 days of his term.
“The supply is not where it should be,” Biden acknowledged in his remarks at the time, but his policy proposals should mean that “as vaccines become available, they will reach more people who need them.”