Amazon offers to help Biden administration with vaccinations

Amazon.com Inc. is offering to help the Biden administration accelerate the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, including to its own employees.

Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress over its growing power, and it isn’t clear whether the Biden administration will step up that scrutiny. (REUTERS)

In a letter dated Wednesday, Dave Clark, the incoming chief executive officer of Amazon's retail unit, offered his congratulations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

He reiterated a request Amazon made to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month asking that frontline workers among the company's more than 800,000 U.S. employees receive vaccines at the “earliest appropriate time.”

Even as much of Amazon's white-collar corporate workforce at its Seattle headquarters and other offices toil from home, the company's warehouses, cloud-computing data centers and Whole Foods Market stores have stayed open through the pandemic.

Clark said 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.

“Additionally, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and exerptise to assist your administration's vaccination efforts,” Clark went on. “Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately” 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 had offered aid to officials working on the presidential transition. “We've offered suggestions, our experiences, and we're open to any ideas the administration might have, the incoming administration might have, in how we can help,” he said.

Amazon is under pressure from regulators and Congress over its growing power, and it isn't clear whether the Biden administration will step up that scrutiny.

Since the virus began spreading across the U.S., America's second-largest private-sector employer has made major adjustments to its sprawling logistics network to accommodate social distancing. 

Still, Amazon last year said that some 20,000 of its employees had 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 insufficient.

By Spencer Soper and Matt Day