The new CEO of Amazon’s retail unit wrote that the company is “prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and resources and communication experience” in vaccinating people.
Amazon.com Inc. is offering to help the Biden administration speed up the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees.
In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the new CEO of Amazon’s retail unit, offered his congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
He reiterated a request by Amazon to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month, calling for frontline workers among the company’s more than 800,000 employees in the United States to receive vaccines “at the earliest appropriate time.”
Even with Amazon’s white-collar corporate workforce at its Seattle headquarters and other offices working from home, the company’s warehouses, cloud computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores remained open during the pandemic.
Clark said Amazon has a contract with an occupational health provider to administer vaccines on its premises.
“We are prepared to act quickly as soon as vaccines are available,” he wrote.
Reuters reported in the letter on Wednesday.
“In addition, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communication skills and experience to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” continued Clark.
“Our scale allows us to have a significant impact immediately” 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 offered help to employees working on the presidential transition.
“We offer suggestions, our experiences and we are open to any ideas that management may have, the next administration may have, about how we can help,” he said.
Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress for its growing power, and it is not clear whether the Biden government will intensify this scrutiny.
Since the virus began to spread across the United States, America’s second largest private sector employer has made major adjustments to its extensive logistics network to accommodate social detachment.
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 officials, lawmakers and labor officials have criticized Amazon’s response to the crisis as insufficient.