The future CEO of Amazon’s retail unit wrote that the company is ‘willing to leverage our operations, information technology and communication capabilities and expertise’ to vaccinate people.
Amazon.com Inc. offers to assist the Biden Administration in accelerating the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the incoming CEO 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 to ask frontline workers among the more than 800,000 U.S. employees to receive vaccinations at the “earliest time.”
Even just as much of Amazon’s operations in Seattle’s headquarters and other home-based offices have left the company’s warehouses, cloud computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores open by the pandemic.
According to Clark, Amazon has a contract with an occupational health provider to administer vaccines at its facilities.
“We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available,” he wrote.
Reuters reported on the letter earlier Wednesday.
“In addition, we are willing to leverage our operations, information technology and communication capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” Clark added.
“Our scale enables us to make an immediate immediate impact” in the fight against the disease, he wrote.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this month, Jay Carney, a former Biden staffer who now runs Amazon’s policy and communications teams, said the company offered assistance to officials working on the presidential transition.
“We have made suggestions, our experiences and we are open to all ideas that the administration can have, and the incoming administration, how we can help,” he said.
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress over its growing power, and it is not clear whether the Biden government will intensify the investigation.
Since the virus began to spread in the US, America’s second largest employer in the private sector has made major adjustments to its extensive logistics network to provide social distance.
Still, 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 inadequate.