Hours after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, news broke that Amazon sent a letter to Biden offering their help in distributing COVID-19 vaccines across the nation.
Here is the letter:
With more than 800,000 employees and an expansive infrastructure, Amazon’s aid could prove invaluable in ramping up vaccine distribution to accomplish Joe Biden’s goal of 100 million doses in his first 100 days (which we are already on track to accomplish). At first glance, one would be pleased by a company in the private sector offering their help in the country achieving herd immunity.
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was approved by the FDA for emergency use on December 11, 2020. One week later, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization for mRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine.
Why wasn’t there a letter sent offering this aid when the vaccines were approved? Better yet, why wasn’t there a letter sent a month before when the FDA authorizations were looking increasingly likely?
When asked about this delay by U.S. Representative Ken Buck via Twitter, Amazon's Public Policy team responded, "Actually, we didn't wait. We offered the Trump administration assistance on vaccines, built new tools for researchers & public health authorities, engaged Operation Warp Speed on logistics & advised on testing & and flew in PPE from China when America needed it most." In a follow-up tweet, @amazon_policy attached this letter:
However, this December letter does not propose Amazon's aid in distributing vaccines to the American people. Instead, this letter is trying to convince Dr. Romero to prioritize Amazon's employees as essential workers so they can get vaccines at the "earliest appropriate time" as part of Phase 1b of the CDC Playbook distribution plans, something they repeated in the letter to Joe Biden. These letters are not the same, and the December letter does not contain offer to help distribute vaccines by "leveraging our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise" that was explicitly stated in the January letter to President Biden.
Obviously, Amazon probably didn't hold Trump in high regard due to his various attacks on the tech giant. Nevertheless, this is a global pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 400,000 people in the United States, and over two million worldwide. Amazon had nothing to lose if they sent a letter to Donald Trump in October or November offering help. If Trump refused Amazon’s offer, then all the bad press would have gone to Donald Trump.
Clearly, the leader of the country needs to show the initiative to properly combat a global pandemic and Donald Trump failed to do that time and time again starting way back in May 2018 when he disbanded the White House pandemic response team. Then, in February 2020 when he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” And so on and so forth.
What’s even more interesting is the lack of questions raised by news outlets like CNN, ABC News, and Reuters. In the media’s reports about Amazon’s letter, only NBC News mentioned how Amazon reps gave no indication that Amazon extended a similar offer to Donald Trump. Dylan Byers of NBC News later tweeted, “For those asking if [a] similar offer was extended to President Trump… I asked. Amazon rep said [the] company was in touch with CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and Dept. of Health and Human Services last month. But no mention of a direct letter to President Trump.”
Personal and political squabbles need not apply to saving lives during a global pandemic, plain and simple. And the failure of reputable outlets to ask the important questions will only lead to further division in this country. Donald Trump deserves most, if not all of the blame when it comes to the country’s response (or lack thereof) to the COVID-19 pandemic. But mainstream media’s possible failure to grill Amazon over their perceived favoritism will only feed into the conspiracy theories about big tech controlling every aspect of our lives and purporting major news organizations like CNN, NBC, and ABC to be “fake news” thus leading to those conspiracy theorists retreating to their echo chambers and we saw the effects of those echo chambers.
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