Harvard Public Health Review Makes the Case for Canceling the Rio Olympics

Long before the Zika virus became a household name, the Rio Olympics were under heavy scrutiny. There were concerns about the health and safety of athletes competing in events held in contaminated waters. There were questions of whether the city could even deliver on its promise to have the infrastructure in place to host. And killings by police in Rio's favelas have steadily increased. Rio de Janeiro is also squarely in the middle of the Zika crisis, and in three months nearly half a million people are expected to visit for the Olympics. Because of this, Amir Attaran, writing in the Harvard Public Health Review, says the Olympics should be canceled.

While Zika is most commonly known to cause microcephaly and other severe fetal birth defects in pregnant women who have been infected with the disease—usually via mosquito bite, but it can be sexually transmitted as well—it can also cause "debilitating and sometimes fatal" conditions in adults as well. In fact, the first American death attributed to Zika was a man in his 70s. This is all to say: there are very serious consequences to exposure to this disease, so is it really worth it to voluntarily expose yourself to that risk? Attaran says no, for a couple of reasons.

First, while the spread of Zika globally is inevitable, there is no good reason to speed the process up and one damned good one not to: time. We don't know everything about the virus, and even the things we do know are evolving; anything that we do to combat its spread requires time to develop. Voluntarily introducing hundreds of thousands of traveling incubators and carriers and unleashing them on airports and cities across the world is the exact wrong thing needed at the moment.

A related concern is the social aspect and implication of the returning travelers. Chances are, if you are visiting Rio for the Olympics, you are doing fairly well financially and find yourself in a certain socioeconomic status. After all, you have the disposable income to visit a foreign country to watch amateur sports. While you might consider the risk and decide to go anyway, many hundreds of thousands more have had that risk analysis stripped from them.

And should that risk become a reality, the wealthy will be in a much better position to combat it—with more access to better doctors and treatment, or simply any access to those things at all—than the poor, who will be put in the familiar position of having their lives changed for the worse because of the fecklessness of those better off than them.

Attaran calls this "ethically questionable," which is fair. Really, though, it's just unethical. If the Olympics were truly about the human spirit and competition and an international community, this would not even be a question. The Olympics would be cancelled, or postponed, or moved. But the Olympics are about money, and with an operating budget of $1.9 billion—16 times higher than the budget to fight Zika, if you were wondering—there is a lot at stake for Rio and the International Olympic Committee. They've built structures with no future uses, an Olympic Village that will turn into a ghost town, and probably paid off more than a fair share of individuals and entities to get it all done. For those reasons, and for none of the reasonable ones, there is no turning back now, international health crisis or not.