Amazon offers help to Biden to speed up vaccine distribution

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the country – and despite its flaws and shortcomings, the company overall excels in logistics and large-scale distribution. Therefore, Amazon suggests that Biden’s newest administration should call on the company to help speed up the distribution of COVID-19 across the country.

“Amazon is ready to help you reach your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your administration,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s head of consumer activities, wrote in a letter Wednesday (PDF ) addressed to President Joe Biden.

Amazon’s more than 800,000 employees should be in the vaccine queue as soon as possible, Clark noted, as people working in Amazon warehouses, AWS data centers, and Whole Foods stores are critical workers who cannot work from home. The company signed an agreement with a third-party healthcare company to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon-owned facilities, Clark added – if they could just get vaccines to administer.

“We are ready to act quickly once the vaccines are available,” Clark wrote. “In addition, we are ready to leverage our operations, information technology, communications capabilities and expertise to aid your administration’s immunization efforts. Our scale allows us to have have a significant impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in that effort. “

“A dismal failure”

There are two COVID-19 vaccines currently approved for use in the United States: one from Pfizer / BoiNTech and one from Moderna. Federal regulators cleared the distribution and use of both in mid-December, over a month ago, but the rollout has been difficult, to say the least.

A week after the Pfizer vaccine became available, state leaders complained about not receiving the doses promised to them by the federal government. The Trump administration blamed the manufacturers, but Pfizer issued a statement at the time saying it had “millions” of doses in a warehouse ready to ship but received no instructions from the federal government. on where to ship them.

By the end of December, the Trump administration had signed an agreement with Pfizer for an additional 100 million doses of the vaccine, bringing the total number of doses ordered in the United States, from both manufacturers, to around 400 million. . Achieving these doses remains difficult, however, and last week the Washington Post reported that the vaccine stockpile, intended to guarantee a reserve of second doses, had already been bled dry.

“The deployment of the vaccine in the United States has been a dismal failure so far,” President Joe Biden said in a speech five days before he was sworn in. He pledged to do everything in his power to speed up vaccine delivery during his administration, with the stated goal of reaching 100 million doses delivered in the first 100 days of his tenure.

“The supply is not where it needs to be,” Biden acknowledged in his remarks at the time, but his policy suggestions should mean that “as the vaccines become available they will reach more people who have them. need”.