Lindsey Wasson/Reuters
- Amazon exec Dave Clark is offering to help President Joe Biden with the vaccination effort.
- Clark touted Amazon’s logistics, communications, and IT expertise in a letter to Biden.
- Clark also asked that Amazon’s essential workers receive the vaccine at the “earliest appropriate time.”
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One of Amazon’s top executives is offering to help President Joe Biden with his pledge to vaccinate 100 million Americans during his first 100 days in office.
Dave Clark, the CEO of Amazon’s consumer business and Jeff Bezos’ second-in-command, sent a letter to Biden shortly after he was sworn in on Wednesday, congratulating the new president and offering to help with the vaccination effort.
NBC News’ Dylan Byers was the first to report on the letter.
“We are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” Clark wrote. “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 also wrote that Amazon's 800,000 US workers, most of whom have been deemed essential, should receive the vaccine at the "earliest appropriate time" and that the company has partnered with a third-party healthcare provider to administer the vaccine at Amazon's facilities.
You can read the full letter below:
—Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) January 20, 2021
Last month, Clark wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention making a similar request. He emphasized that many workers in Amazon's fulfillment centers or employees at Whole Foods Markets nationwide cannot work from home and have been supplying Americans with essential goods throughout the pandemic.
Biden pledged last month that his administration will ramp up the pace of vaccinations by "five to six times the current pace to 1 million shots a day," an initiative that he said would require more funding from Congress.
"The effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should," Biden said last month, adding that at the current rate, "it's going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people."