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ASPEN, Colo. — The U.S. Olympic workforce’s prime physician says all the 200-plus athletes heading to Beijing for the Winter Video games subsequent month are absolutely vaccinated, and never a single one requested for a medical exemption.
Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Finnoff advised The Related Press the 21-day quarantine interval the IOC is requiring for unvaccinated members, mixed with the schooling the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee supplied, “actually resonated with the athletes.”
“Vaccination is form of the muse of our COVID mitigation protocol,” Finnoff mentioned Thursday.
In September, the USOPC launched a policy requiring U.S. athletes to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 1 except that they had a medical exemption. A few month later, the IOC put out tips calling for full vaccinations or a three-week quarantine interval upon getting into China.
Heading into Summer season Olympics in Tokyo final 12 months, Finnoff estimated that 100 of the more than 600 Americans competing weren’t vaccinated.
The U.S. will finalize the members of the winter workforce this week. It’s anticipated to incorporate about 240 athletes. Qualifying for the Paralympics continues to be ongoing, however Finnoff mentioned to this point, the USOPC hasn’t obtained requests for exemptions from potential Paralympians.
The USOPC has been organizing testing and flights for the athletes, a lot of whom will go to Beijing on charter flights. All want two unfavourable assessments — one inside 96 hours of their flight to China, and one other inside 72.
The federation is holding extra informational conferences with athletes over the following week, at which it is going to reiterate the requirement of athletes to stick to the host nation’s legal guidelines when contemplating any sort of protest or demonstration.
Earlier this week, a bunch of human rights activists urged athletes not to criticize China for worry they may very well be prosecuted.
“Actually, the tradition and legal guidelines of China are distinct from ours,” CEO Sarah Hirshland mentioned. “And we now have an obligation and an obligation to ensure that they’re effectively knowledgeable. On the similar time we have to guarantee them that they’ve received a sturdy help workforce behind them alongside the best way.”
With stories swirling that personal information could be compromised online in China, the USOPC joined another international locations in telling athletes to convey burner telephones if doable.
Hirshland referred to as NBC’s decision earlier this week to not ship on-air reporters to cowl the video games a case of the community doing “the precise enterprise continuity planning” to make sure they will ship full protection to america.
Not surprisingly, Hirshland wouldn’t decide to a medals prediction. She did level out that the U.S. heads into the video games with 11 athletes who’re ranked No. 1 of their respective disciplines. That features Mikaela Shiffrin within the Alpine World Cup total standings and Purple Gerard within the World Snowboard Factors checklist for slopestyle.
The U.S. received 23 medals on the Pyeongchang Olympics, good for fourth on the medals desk.
“You add the potential for COVID and we face the identical actuality as we did going into Tokyo, uncertain what the beginning traces will appear to be,” Hirshland mentioned. “However we’re not in a definite scenario from the remainder of the world. We’re all going through the identical challenges.”
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