Amazon is offering to lend President Joe Biden his operational experience to transport coronavirus vaccines quickly across the country, while the government struggles with the logistics of implementing inoculation. But the move could also help the company drive its own expansion ambitions into the $ 3.8 trillion healthcare market.
The company made a presentation on Wednesday, just hours after Biden took office, offering little detail about how it plans to help with the difficult effort to distribute the vaccine. But if accepted, the offer could give Amazon a new treasure trove of health data as it is expanding into pharmacy and digital health. This worries critics – including progressives who ask Biden to keep big tech companies at bay.
“It needs to be transparent and a genuine offer of help, not an exchange,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University specializing in public health law. He said he feared that Amazon could use any federal agreement to promote its own corporate advantage “because they are well known as a company that literally tries to dominate the market and force out any competition”.
“As this is a back door to do this using our own government, we shouldn’t be looking at it with optimism, but we should be very concerned,” he said.
A spokesman for Amazon rejected the idea that the company’s offer was motivated by a desire to gain a competitive advantage or provoke good publicity. The spokesman, noting that Amazon made a similar offer to the states last month, said it is a matter of public responsibility for companies to help in the health crisis.
“There are things that we as a country will have to do to overcome this pandemic and that includes lending our experience and knowledge to things like logistics and the testing program we have built,” said the spokesman.
It is unclear to what extent the new White House is taking Amazon’s offer seriously, which a company spokesman said is still being finalized. A White House representative, when asked about the government’s vision, noted that the vaccination effort represents a “tremendous challenge” that will require “public, private and nonprofit sectors to work together to provide the solutions we need at the scale in we need. “
Amazon’s offer comes at a time when Biden officials say they are struggling to fix a vaccine distribution system they inherited from the Trump administration. Jeff Zients, coordinator of Covid-19 in Biden, complained this week that authorities have limited ability to monitor the distribution and distribution of vaccines. Biden promised to mount a robust federal vaccination effort after former President Donald Trump pushed most of the work to states, which say they have little perception of the country’s vaccine supply.
In Amazon’s letter to Biden, head of global operations Dave Clark said the company’s scale “allows us to make a significant impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19”. The company, wrote Clark, is “prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communication and experience capabilities to assist its administration’s vaccination efforts.”
It is a potentially attractive offer, some say. Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety policy in the nation’s largest hospital lobby, the American Hospital Association, said the vaccination effort needs more “experience in managing significant logistical challenges”.
“We accept ads like this from Amazon, which will help put more photos into practice across the country,” said Foster.
The Trump administration recruited large companies to help distribute vaccines. She hired UPS and FedEx to handle ground transportation, American Airlines for airfreight and McKesson to distribute Moderna’s photo. Experts say government collaboration with Amazon could be beneficial if the company fills in the gaps in the supply chain.
Other corporate giants have joined the vaccination effort this week. In Washington State, Democratic Governor Jay Inslee has partnered with Starbucks, Microsoft, Costco and others to assist with the state’s deployment. Amazon is also opening a pop-up vaccination post at its Seattle headquarters on Sunday, with the goal of administering 2,000 vaccines.
The Amazon spokesman said the company’s internal Covid-19 test sites could act as vaccination centers. There are currently more than 650 across the company, said the spokesman, with the ability to test up to 50,000 employees a day.
Some critics emphasized that any federal government deal with Amazon would need to be examined carefully – and in the absence of details, some saw possible landmines. Technology watchers warn that Amazon’s offer of help comes just two months after launching an online pharmacy, after years of speculation that it was looking to market.
Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a corporate watchdog group, said she was concerned about how Amazon would use information from a vaccination effort.
“Amazon is a company that has already accumulated an incomparable amount of data about Americans and we have no idea how it would handle the data collected through the distribution of vaccines,” she said.
Some Amazon critics said they saw the company’s offer to Biden as an attempt to bolster Washington’s support, while the company and the technology industry in general face increasing scrutiny of their business practices, including the use of user data. .
“This is Amazon’s attempt to get favors from Democrats and spread the idea that its disproportionate power is something we should embrace,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the advocacy group at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for Sustainable Community Development, which is monitoring vaccine delivery efforts at the local level.
Other critics do not believe that Amazon’s offer means much.
“This is a government role,” said Alex Harman of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It may require partnerships here and there, it may imply the confiscation of private resources from time to time, but real logistics and understanding of logistics are what the government is for.”