COVID vaccine: China deal to vaccinate Olympic athletes is a vaccine diplomacy coup

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced Thursday it had accepted an offer from Beijing to vaccinate athletes attending the Summer Games, hosted in Tokyo this July, and the Winter Games, which Beijing will host next February.

“The IOC has received a kind offer from the Chinese Olympic Committee, hosts of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, to make additional vaccine doses available to participants in both editions of the Games,” IOC president Thomas Bach said while addressing a virtual presentation hosted by the head of Tokyo’s Olympic organizing committee, Seiko Hashimoto, on Thursday.

While details of the agreement remain scarce, the news is a coup for Beijing, since it demonstrates the IOC’s commitment to holding the Winter Olympics in China next year. Rights groups have pressured the IOC to withdraw the 2022 Winter Olympics from China owing to Beijing’s persecution of minority groups in Xinjiang (which Beijing denies), but the IOC has said the Winter Games will go ahead as planned.

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“The Games are not Chinese Games; the Games are the IOC Games…The decision on hosting is not made with a view to signaling approval of a government policy,” long-serving IOC member Dick Pound told the BBC last month.

Regardless of whether the IOC sees accepting China’s vaccine support as political, the deal fits Beijing’s pattern of engaging in “vaccine diplomacy” during the pandemic, or pledging free vaccines to curry favor with potential ally countries.

The IOC is financing the vaccines which, according to the committee, will be distributed to National Olympic Committees in countries that have already approved the use of vaccines from China.

According to Bach, the deal with China will provide a vaccination for each participating athlete, plus two additional vaccines per athlete meant for the general population of the competitor’s home country. The IOC will cover the cost of the shots, but it isn’t clear which of China’s four domestically developed vaccines will be used.

“The Chinese Olympic Committee is ready in cooperation with the IOC to make these additional doses available…either via collaboration with international partners or directly in countries where agreements regarding Chinese vaccines are in place,” Bach said.

A number of countries have already included Olympic athletes in their priority groups for vaccination, including Mexico, Lithuania, India, Hungary, and Israel. Mexico plans to distribute three of China’s vaccines—those from drugmakers Sinovac, CanSino, and Sinopharm—while Hungary is using Sinopharm. Israel is distributing the Pfizer vaccine; Lithuania has Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca; while India is favoring its own brands.

Vaccinating athletes would help make the Tokyo Summer Games, scheduled to start in July, a little safer, as tens of thousands of athletes descend upon the Japanese capital. Tokyo is not requiring that participating athletes be vaccinated before the Summer Games, triggering fears that the spectacle could turn into a global superspreader event.

That risk could be coloring public opinion of the games. According to a January poll by Kyodo News, Japanese citizens are overwhelmingly against the Olympics going ahead this summer, with 80% of respondents saying the Olympic and Paralympic Games should either be canceled or postponed. But organizers are determined to go ahead.

A decision is expected this month on whether international fans will be able to attend the Games. Japanese media have reported that local authorities have already decided no, but the government has yet to make an announcement.