OLYMPIC MADNESS: OFFICIAL PARTNER JOINS PUBLIC & DOCTORS IN CALLING FOR CANCELLATION

With less than two months until the 2020 Summer Olympics are due to start in Tokyo, one of the games’ official partners has joined calls for it to be cancelled. 

With COVID-19 surging in Japan, opinion polls show the vast majority of the public is now against the games going ahead. As previously reported, medical experts and associations have also been demanding the games are cancelled. 

But now an official partner of the Tokyo Olympics, Japanese newspaper publisher Asahi Shimbun, has also joined calls for the Summer Games to be axed. 

An editorial published in the Asahi Daily on Wednesday said: “We ask Prime Minister (Yoshihide) Suga to calmly and objectively assess the situation and decide on the cancellation of the event this summer. We are far from a situation in which everybody can be confident they will be ‘safe and secure.”

Reflecting the level of opposition to the Olympics going ahead, the editorial quickly went viral, racking up over 30,000 tweets within hours. 

Host city Tokyo is currently under a state of emergency, which is expected to be extended again, and earlier this week reports stated that hospitals in Osaka, Japan’s second largest city, were close to being overwhelmed by a huge new wave of COVID infections, with doctors warning of a “system collapse” and again urging the government to cancel the Olympics.

Despite all of this, Olympic organisers are refusing to change plans, insisting that the games can be held safely. 

AYO.NEWS says:

It looks like Olympic organisers are placing what amounts to blind faith in the effectiveness of the vaccination program and physical infection controls. However, considering the fact that the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission, but merely reduce severe symptoms, and are clearly far less effective against emerging variants than politicians would like people to believe, this all seems like a recipe for disaster. 

One thing is absolutely clear now: if the Olympics does go ahead, and it fuels the virus and causes preventable illness and deaths, there’s going to be a whole lot of anger, and probably more than a few lawsuits, directed at the IOC and organisers.