In what amounts to a public relations coup for China and a solution to a problem for the International Olympic Committee, IOC President Thomas Bach announced on Thursday that China has agreed to provide coronavirus vaccines to any participant who needs one before Tokyo this summer Beijing Olympics and Winter Games next year.
Bach said the Olympic committee will cover the cost of vaccines for any Olympic and Paralympic competitors who need them, and that the distribution will take place through existing international agencies. It is not known how many doses will be purchased or how much the program will cost, but vaccinating participants before they arrive reassures the skeptical public that the Games will not turn into a super distributor event for Japan – where research shows a strong trend against the Games and a national vaccination program is still in its early stages – the reward for the IOC will be incalculable.
Thursday’s announcement by Bach, elected for a new four-year term the day before, will help the IOC to resolve a sensitive issue that has been one of the many questions hanging over the Tokyo Games: how to ensure that thousands of visitors from Japan around the world will be vaccinated when they arrive, and how to do it without looking fit, young elite athletes and their teams have skipped the line as the global number of deaths from the coronavirus continues to grow.
For China, the agreement with the IOC – which will include two vaccines for the general population of an athlete’s home country for each given to a participant in the Olympics – can help deflect growing public scrutiny and criticism about the record of the country’s human rights ahead of the next Beijing Winter Games.
Although China has rejected any talk of losing the Games, activists have focused on the country taking Hong Kong out of its promised democratic freedoms and mass incarceration of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. In January, the United States government said that forced Uighur arrests amounted to “genocide”.
Bach gave few details about the program, the amount of vaccine that will be purchased or the potential cost. But it is unlikely to correspond to a significant number for the sports organization, which has been promoting closer ties with China under Bach. In 2015, China intervened to save the Olympic authorities in a difficult situation with an offer to host the 2022 Winter Games, after the IOC had a series of bankruptcies amid growing public opposition. More recently, Chinese companies have agreed to partner with the Olympic movement, committing millions of dollars in support.
In recent months, China has also made vaccines a tool of its foreign policy, sometimes exporting precious doses, although it still needs tens of millions of them at home. It has approved four vaccines, all of which are for domestic or foreign use. The country produces single and double dose vaccines, but in tests, each has produced varying degrees of effectiveness.
Bach said the vaccine offer was made by the Chinese Olympic Committee, confirming vague statements he had made earlier this year about securing batches of vaccine doses before the Games.
“The offer is to make additional doses of vaccine available to participants for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022,” said Bach in a speech on Thursday at the IOC’s annual meeting.
“The Chinese Olympic Committee is ready, in cooperation with the IOC, to make these additional doses available in two ways: either through collaboration with international partners or directly in the various countries where Chinese vaccine agreements already exist.”
Bach emphasized that the IOC would also pay for extra doses for the general population of countries that need its assistance.
An increasing number of countries, a group as diverse as India, Hungary and Israel, have already announced that they will push their Olympic athletes to the front of their vaccination lines. The president of Mexico this month placed athletes from his country in a priority group alongside medical professionals and teachers. Lithuania has changed even faster; started administering vaccines to his Olympic athletes weeks ago.