(Kyodo News via AP)
We recently learned that both IOC Vice President John Coates and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga have been taking a beating in the approval rating race due to their insistence that the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo will move forward. The country remains in an extended state of emergency because of the COVID pandemic and well over half of Japan’s citizens disapprove of the decision. As a solution to this dilemna, Suga announced that he would be setting up two mass vaccination sites in a pair of his country’s largest cities, attempting to develop enough herd immunity to avoid turning the games into one of the biggest superspreader events seen in the pandemic thus far.
It may be too little, too late.
That s the realization sinking in as Japan scrambles to catch up on a frustratingly slow vaccination drive less than two months before the Summer Olympics, delayed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, are scheduled to start.
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The Olympics risk becoming an incubator for “a Tokyo variant,” as 15,000 foreign athletes and tens of thousands officials, sponsors and journalists from about 200 countries descend on and potentially mix with a largely unvaccinated Japanese population, said Dr. Naoto Ueyama, a physician, head of the Japan Doctors Union.