The new CEO of Amazon’s retail division wrote that the company is “willing to use our business, information technology and communication capabilities and expertise” in vaccinating people.
Amazon.com Inc. offers to help Biden’s administration accelerate the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to his own employees.
In a letter on Wednesday, Dave Clark, the new CEO of Amazon’s retail unit, offered his congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
He echoed a request Amazon made to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month, asking that front-line workers among the company’s more than 800,000 US employees be given vaccines at the “earliest appropriate time.”
Even as much of Amazon’s office workers at its Seattle headquarters and other offices toil from home, its warehouses, cloud computing data centers, and Whole Foods Market stores have remained open during the pandemic.
Clark said Amazon has a contract with a health and safety service provider to administer vaccines at its facilities.
“We are ready to act quickly once vaccines are available,” he wrote.
Reuters reported about the letter earlier on Wednesday.
“In addition, we are willing to use our business, information technology and communications capabilities and expertise to support your administration’s vaccination efforts,” continued Clark.
“Our scale allows us to have an immediate meaningful impact” in the fight against the disease, he wrote.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television earlier this month, Jay Carney, a former Biden employee who now heads Amazon’s policy and communications teams, said the company had offered assistance to officials working on the presidential transition.
“We’ve made suggestions and our experiences, and we’re open to any ideas the administration has, the incoming administration, how we can help,” he said.
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress for its growing power, and it’s not clear whether the Biden administration will strengthen that scrutiny.
Since the virus began spreading across the US, America’s second-largest private sector employer has made major adjustments to its expansive logistics network to accommodate social distances.
Still, Amazon said last year that about 20,000 of its employees had tested positive for the virus in the first six months of the pandemic. Some workers, lawmakers and workers have criticized Amazon’s response to the crisis as inadequate.