Amazon offered the Biden administration assistance in distributing vaccines with its large number of nationwide resources moments after President Joe Biden was sworn in on Wednesday. According to the company, Amazon was ready to help with the new president’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of the new government.
“We are willing to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to help your administration’s vaccination efforts,” wrote Amazon’s global consumer CEO Dave Clark. “Our scale enables us to immediately make a significant impact in the fight against COVID-19.”
+ For those asking if similar offer to President Trump is being expanded … I asked. Amazon’s representative said the company was in touch last month with CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices and the Department of Health and Human Services. But no mention was made of a direct letter to President Trump.
– Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) 20 January 2021
While this is a laudable gesture at first glance, it is a delayed, without any good explanation from Amazon as to why the company waited, more than a month after two FDA emergency vaccines were cleared. assistance until immediately after Biden took office. Meanwhile, states and cities have remained locked up with government officials citing a furious virus to justify draconian measures, declaring their livelihoods on small businesses “unimportant” while companies like Amazon thrive in the elite-driven pandemic.
Amazon declined to give an on-the-record response to The Federalist on whether the company gave the Trump administration the same offer it made to Biden on Wednesday, although Trump officials told Fox News that the previous White House, which carried out the historic Operation Warp Speed. , no such letter was given suggesting assistance.
Amazon did tell the Federalist that the company was in contact with Operation Warp Speed and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but gave little information and did not say the company extended a helping hand to public to facilitate vaccination efforts. One letter to the CDC, dated December 16, requested that the government prioritize essential workers in their vaccination guidelines to provide protection to its own employees.
‘We ask it [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] “continues to prioritize those essential workers who are unable to work from home, such as those who work at Amazon fulfillment centers, AWS data centers and Whole Foods Market stores,” Clark told ACIP chairman, according to Fox News. Dr. Jose R. Romero, written.
The FDA approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on December 11 and approved Moderna’s on December 18, each more than a month before the inauguration day this week.
The five- to six-week delay in offering resources when such aid was available, as the vaccination of state instruments at the state level struggled, probably cost thousands of lives, as viral cases reached new heights in the new year, while locking up the enriched suitcases of the corporate technology giants who benefited greatly from the pandemic. The optics of the delay, without any sound explanation for it, make it appear animos to Trump and recall the Pfizer announcement of its effectiveness against the vaccine days after the November election. Biden has been informed of the effectiveness of the vaccine in front of officials in the Trump administration, who have heard about it through the media.
The Trump administration devoted its resources primarily to the development of vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, and by the end of the year, two reliable vaccines had successfully landed. Vaccination, however, was left to the states, a decision that President Biden has now declared a mistake. He is federalizing vaccination efforts, with the goal of giving 100 million Americans immunity by the end of his first hundred days in office, which ends in late April.
Dr. Joel Zinberg, a senior fellow at the libertarian-leaning Conservative Enterprise Institute who worked between 2017 and 2019 to prepare for the Trump White House pandemic, said Biden’s goal was too ambitious and put the federal government’s experience in direct called health care. The federal government, Zinberg noted, is not known for providing the most capable health care directly, as evidenced by recent problems in veterans matters.
“It will have to be done from scratch,” Zinberg said of the entire operation from facilities to logistics. “I think the prospect of that happening in the next 100 days is pretty slim.”
However, Amazon’s decision to provide access to its large nationwide resources offers an optimistic point that Biden’s goals may be possible with the private sector not being given the same company by its same Republican predecessor.