Amazon Offers To Help Biden With Covid Vaccine Delivery

Amazon.com Inc. has offered to help the newly sworn-in US President Joe Biden with speedy delivery of Covid-19 vaccines across the United States amid the ongoing pandemic crisis.

The e-commerce giant, whose majority of workers are in the frontline of the pandemic, reiterated its request to prioritize its essential workers to receive the vaccines at the earliest appropriate time.

In a letter, Amazon executive Dave Clark, while congratulating Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, wrote the company stands ready to assist them in reaching their goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of the new administration.

Amazon said it is “prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts. Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against Covid-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort.”

Clark in December had wrote to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue vaccines to frontline workers among its more than 800,000 U.S. employees at the earliest appropriate time.

Amazon is the nation’s second-biggest private employer behind Walmart Inc. Most of its employees work in essential roles at Amazon fulfillment centers, AWS data centers, and Whole Foods Market stores.

Amazon, which has a contract with an occupational health provider to administer vaccines at its facilities, said it is prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available.

Amazon had confirmed in early October that its nearly 20,000 frontline workers in the U.S. had tested positive or have been presumed positive for COVID-19 between March 1 and September 19. The company earlier said it was conducting thousands of covid tests every day as part of its effort to keep front-line employees safe.

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