Amazon urges Biden to prioritise its workers for Covid-19 vaccine

San Francisco: In a letter addressed to US President Joe Biden, Amazon has said that its essential workers who cannot work from home should receive the Covid-19 vaccine at the “earliest appropriate” time.

Amazon also said that the company stands ready to assist the Biden administration in reaching the goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of the new administration, GeekWire reported on Wednesday.

“The essential employees working at Amazon fulfilment centres, AWS data centres, and Whole Foods Market stores across the country who cannot work from home should receive the Covid-19 vaccine at the earliest appropriate time,” Dave Clark, CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, wrote in the letter.

“We will assist them in that effort,” he said.

Amazon, which has over 800,000 employees in the US, earlier faced criticism from former and current employees who had alleged that the safety measures put in place by the company to protect warehouse employees were inadequate.

However, Amazon said that it invested $10 billion to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers throughout 2020.

Clark, in his letter to Biden, said that Amazon has an agreement in place with a licensed third-party occupational health care provider to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon facilities.

“We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available,” he said.

“Additionally, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration’s vaccination efforts,” Clark said in the letter.