Amazon Supports Weekly Humanitarian Relief Flights to Venezuela in First-of-its-Kind Collaboration

MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 8, 2026--

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced it will support a seven-flight humanitarian air delivery operation into Caracas, Venezuela, in response to the devastating twin earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela on June 24, leaving more than 650,000 people in need of aid.

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The weekly flights are possible through a collaboration between Amazon, Airlink, the U.S. State Department, and United Nations World Food Programme. The State Department will coordinate access with local authorities, Amazon will donate the aircraft and fuel at no cost to humanitarian organizations, Airlink will determine what goes on each flight based on nonprofit needs, and the World Food Programme will manage logistics in Venezuela.

"When more than 6 million people are affected and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, getting supplies quickly isn't just helpful—it's critical," said Bettina Stix, Director of Amazon's Community Impact. "This air bridge will route supplies to trusted nonprofits on the ground in Venezuela that can put them to use immediately to serve the people most affected by this catastrophe."

The humanitarian air bridge is designed to prevent an aid bottleneck—as well as a so-called "second disaster" when unrequested in-kind donations overwhelm communities and divert resources from the most urgent needs. Throughout history, collaborative humanitarian air bridges have been established to meet critical civilian needs, including after World War II, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and after Haiti earthquakes in 2010 and 2021.

Nearly a decade ago, Amazon launched its disaster relief program to use the same logistics network and aviation capabilities that deliver packages every day to customers to get emergency supplies to people who need them most. The company started with a first relief flight for Hurricane Maria and has since donated and delivered more than 26 million emergency supplies and technology in response to 200+ disasters around the world. This first-of-its-kind collaboration with Airlink is another important step in supporting people affected by natural disasters. The weekly flights are possible through Amazon Air Cargo, an air freight network built for reliability and scale. Amazon partners said:

"In a disaster of this magnitude, coordination and speed of response is everything. Amazon's donated airlift capacity allows us to move quickly and efficiently to heavily-impacted communities in Venezuela—eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring that every flight delivers what they need most. This partnership embodies Airlink's model in action: bringing the humanitarian, aviation, public, and private sectors together to get help to people in their moment of greatest need." — Paloma Adams-Allen, Airlink President and CEO

"The need on the ground in Venezuela is immense. This air bridge will support the transfer of supplies to communities efficiently through trusted humanitarian channels. Once cargo arrives in Caracas, our teams coordinate staging and distribution, so aid reaches those who need it without delay." — World Food Programme Country Director in Venezuela Stephanie Hochstetter

"This collaboration with Amazon, Airlink, and World Food Programme demonstrates what's possible when government and the private sector come together to overcome logistical barriers in a humanitarian crisis. By facilitating access and coordinating with local authorities, we're helping ensure that lifesaving aid reaches Venezuela as quickly as possible." — State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott

The air bridge is one part of a broad Amazon relief effort for Venezuela earthquake relief, which includes ongoing support to more than a dozen nonprofits supporting communities on the ground, volunteering events led by Amazon team members in multiple cities, and the donation and delivery of over half a million emergency supplies within days of the earthquakes. Supplies already in the hands of those who need them include tarps, water filters, sleeping bags, hygiene kits, diapers, and more. In addition, Amazon put its technology expertise to work to help the people of Venezuela—supplying rapid response technology systems (self-contained units that provide critical technology like Wi-Fi in the aftermath of disasters). In La Guaira, Venezuela, near the epicenter of the twin quakes, the systems are connecting staff at hospitals and shelters and enabling them to communicate across locations. Amazon will continue working closely with organizations on the ground as their needs evolve and stands with the people of Venezuela who have been impacted by this catastrophe.

About Amazon

When major disasters strike, Amazon applies the same strengths that get packages to doorsteps every day to get critical aid where it’s needed, fast. We work with local organizations who understand their communities best, applying our core business capabilities in logistics, technology, and innovation to help. Since 2017, we've donated and delivered more than 26 million emergency supplies and technology in response to more than 200 disasters around the world. For more information, visit aboutamazon.com/impact/community.

Seven weekly flights will deliver critical earthquake relief supplies to nonprofits

It’s not always patience and luck that get patients off the organ transplant waiting list and into the operating room.

Unlike in many areas of medicine, experts say there’s a lot of variation in the U.S. transplant system. Knowing there are differences and what to ask might help.

“I had to ask a lot of questions to figure out what it was that I could do to move the needle,” said Katherine Screws of Phoenix, who got a rare intestine transplant after she decided to get on the waiting list at more than one hospital to increase her chances.

It can be difficult to learn how to navigate that search, but there's publicly available information about which hospitals perform the most of each type of transplant, plus their waiting times and outcomes. Long used by experts analyzing the transplant system, the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, or SRTR, database has new patient-friendly tools developed in the hopes that more would-be transplant recipients will use it.

“People are making these really high-stakes decisions without understanding the options,” said Dr. Allyson Hart of Minnesota’s Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, who helped design the tools.

Here are some things to know.

There are about 100,000 people on the U.S. transplant list at any given time, the vast majority of whom need a kidney. With just over 49,000 transplants performed in the U.S last year, more people than ever are getting new organs. It’s mostly thanks to over a decade of increases in donations from the deceased, which are recovered by organ procurement organizations, or OPOs.

But more organs are needed to meet the demand, and different transplant hospitals have different criteria for who they'll accept on their waiting list.

Sometimes, “if a patient receives a ‘no’ at one place, they can go somewhere else and be successfully transplanted,” said Dr. Syed Ali Husain, a kidney specialist at NYU Langone Health.

Each transplant program's waiting list is linked to a national automated matching system. OPOs enter information about viable organs into that system, which generates lists of possible matches at multiple hospitals in order of priority. When the OPO offers an organ, the transplant team must quickly decide if it's a good choice for that patient or the offer moves to the hospital with the next-in-line candidate.

Some hospitals are more conservative than others about which organs they’ll accept, said Husain, who studies such differences.

One large study of kidney transplants found “there’s about a 16-fold variation in how quickly a patient will get transplanted at one center versus another,” he said. That's partly because some surgeons have more experience than others using kidneys with complex anatomy such as extra arteries, or those from older, sicker donors that still may be better than dialysis for the right patient.

Typically, a doctor or other health worker points patients to the nearest hospital offering the kind of transplant they need. But the SRTR database allows people to compare transplant centers around the country in multiple ways.

Search for a particular organ and a list of the highest-to-lowest-volume centers pops up, with dials to show how they perform on such measures as getting a transplant faster, survival on the waiting list and the new organ's survival. Click on those of interest for more data.

For certain organs, there's a “personalized decision guide” to customize the search a little more with demographic and medical information that compares outcomes for patients similar to you. It may be important to know, for example, if hospitals you’re considering perform transplants for a lot of older adults or people with certain chronic illnesses, Hart said.

There's more data about kidneys, the most-transplanted organ, and a kidney decision aid also allows adding factors such as blood type and diabetes that play a particular role in those transplants. That tool shows the chances of getting a transplant in the first five years after joining the waiting list, or the alternatives — still waiting or having died or become too sick to get a transplant.

Like Screws, the Phoenix patient, some people choose to “double list” at a hospital closer to home and another higher-volume transplant program further away.

While not everyone is able to travel, the search tools can also help inform discussions with your chosen transplant program.

It's OK to come to a transplant program to say, “'Hey, there are other centers that do this faster. Help me understand why,'” Hart said. “Sometimes, that conversation is really enough to prompt maybe more aggressive offer acceptance than that center might otherwise do on their own.”

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Dr. Cal Matsumoto, a MedStar Georgetown University Hospital transplant surgeon, gestures to a chart on the digestive system on March 4, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Shelby Lum)