Olympic Teams are getting vaccinated.
You probably won’t be seeing this story across the Comcast news platforms including NBC News, after all Comcast pours an awful lot of cash into the Olympic movement, but it appears some Olympic athletes are jumping the line and getting COVID-19 vaccines in certain countries. The Italian National Olympic Committee claims it will never ask its athletes to jump the line to get the vaccines so the athletes can compete in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Other countries have begun the process of getting its athletes and support staff inoculated including Hungary, Serbia and Israel. The Israeli team will have everyone connected to the squad vaccinated by May. The International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach is all for the vaccinations as he and the IOC attempt to salvage what they can of the Tokyo Games. It is estimated that Japan has sunk $15 billion into the event that was canceled after the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020.
The International Olympic Committee is not requiring athletes and staff that are eligible to compete in the 2021 Tokyo Games to get the shots. The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee has been unusually quiet on the issue but with the terrible rollout of the COVID-19 vaccinations in America, the last thing the USOPC probably wants to do is jump ahead of people who have been identified in high-risk categories who have been unable to get the shots. But Bach has told national Olympic committees that the IOC with cooperation from the World Health Organization would help them obtain vaccinations for athletes and staffs. Belgium’s Olympic committee has requested about 400 vaccines for its team. The 2021 Tokyo Games is scheduled to open on July 23rd but there is no guarantee that the government of Japan will allow the Games to go on. The pandemic has not gone away.
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