National Post (National Edition)
Jumping the vaccine queue to save the Games?
Dick Pound floats idea that likely won't fly
Look, nobody really likes to shoot fish in a barrel. But sometimes the barrel is full, and the fish have to be done away with in a hurry, and you’re the only one around with a new Mossberg 500 and a box of shells. On Thursday, Calgary’s International Olympic Committee member, Dick Pound, gave his latest interview on the status of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to Britain’s Sky News.
The “2020” games, delayed by COVID-19 from their original date, are tentatively scheduled to kick off on July 23. Pound is hoping to save the Games, even though a state of emergency was declared in Tokyo Friday because of rising case-detection and mortality rates. (Japan, for what it’s worth, has suffered about 3,800 COVID-19 deaths; the population of the country is close to three times Canada’s, and its people are the world’s oldest.)
Nobody really knows what the world will look like in the summer, but Pound feels the Olympics would have a fair shot — if only the Olympic member countries will do him a solid and decide to advance their participating athletes in the vaccination queue. How does he know that such a controversial notion is plausible? Pound assured his British listeners that public opinion in Canada would have no trouble with it.
“In Canada, where we might have 300 or 400 athletes — to take 300 or 400 vaccines out of several million in order to have Canada represented at an international event of this stature, character and level — I don’t think there would be any kind of a public outcry about that. It’s a decision for each country to make and there will be people saying they are jumping the queue but I think that is the most realistic way of it going ahead.”
Well, now, if there were to be a public outcry about this idea, I suppose the most natural place for international viewers of Dick Pound’s statement to look for it would be in the comment pages of Canadian national newspapers. So let me state for the benefit of those people: Dick is probably badly mistaken. Canadians have barely become conscious of the prospect of mass vaccination, and there is already some political quarrelling over the ordering of eligibility because the pre-existing schedule includes aged federal prisoners.
Once the general public is being vaccinated in descending order of age, we will become more conscious of the stakes. The making of exceptions is not likely to be popular after every SOB like Pound has advanced an idea for one, and creating an exception specifically for the country’s most physically fit individuals could attract some quite serious abuse.
I might be wrong, of course. The Olympics are awfully popular in Canada, and if Pound can manage to hang up on Sky News and address his homeland directly, emphasizing that an entire Summer Olympics cycle is at stake, we might actually be persuaded to make “300 or 400” exceptions to vaccine schedules — although our Olympic delegation is bound to include some trainers and organizers and politicians’ nieces and nephews; maybe they slipped Dick’s mind.
The question is where Pound will find himself in the inevitable queue of persons arguing for an exception that is convenient to them — and almost everybody in that queue, really, will have stronger moral and economic cases from the get-go. Maybe you can find 300 senior citizens willing to risk their necks so that we can watch modern pentathlon and Olympic skateboarding. (I’ll be fair: the skateboarding will probably make terrific TV.) But can you find 300 or 400 warehouse workers or grocery cashiers? Has Pound polled farm and greenhouse employees living in dormitories? Did he check with students in college and university residences, or anybody who is already having a second year of in-person education obliterated?
Well, there is no point in questioning Pound’s authority to speak for Canada; he has already gone and done it. Every Canadian he has ever talked to, I am sure, has told him how much they love the Olympics. In speaking of the Games, the word “character” plops out of his mouth naturally. And why not? Pound using his country as a promotional catspaw, a convenient means of influencing policy elsewhere before bothering to initiate any public discussion here, seems perfectly typical of the historic character of the International Olympic Committee.