John Coates says the IOC will ‘continue to plan’ for 2021Views counter to Shinzo Abe’s belief that ‘it would be hard’A senior IOC figure has played down suggestions from the
Japan Medical Association that it would be “difficult” for the Tokyo Olympics to take place without a vaccine for the
Coronavirus, saying they were merely “an opinion”.
John Coates, head of the IOC’s coordination commission for the Olympics and a close ally of IOC president Thomas Bach, insisted that the Games going ahead were not contingent on the development of a vaccine in the next 15 months.