I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, June 3rd.

In 50 days, Tokyo will host the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, but the host country has only fully vaccinated about 2 to 3% of its population.

Another hurdle for the beleaguered games, 10,000 out of the 80,000 unpaid volunteers have recently dropped out ahead of the July 23rd opening. Now, despite all of this,

the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, is signaling that it is moving forward with games.

They're signaling that today by unveiling the costumes, music, and the podiums that will be

used for the ceremonies. And it's not just Japan and COVID in the Olympics controversy news right now.

The IOC is also facing pushback for hosting its winter 2022 games in Beijing.

A growing number of human rights groups are calling for a boycott of those games

because of China's persecution of Uyghur Muslims.

Joining me now to talk about all of this all the way from Tokyo is Stephen Wade, sports

writer for the Associated Press.

Stephen, I think it's the middle of the night out there, isn't it?

So thank you very much for doing this.

You're welcome.

You're very welcome.

You reported on the 10,000 volunteers dropping out just this morning, or I guess afternoon. What are the former volunteers telling organizers?

They're afraid of COVID. They're not going to be vaccinated. None of the volunteers, 80,000 would be vaccinated unless they had contact with the athletes. Very few will. And so the athletes,

the volunteers won't be vaccinated. And they're getting cold feet like many people here in Tokyo

about these games. And so you're right. Unpaid volunteers are a key workforce in running the Olympics

and save organizers millions of dollars in salaries. What sort of work

do these unpaid volunteers typically do? And why do they do it for free? Are there any perks at least?

Well, in typical Olympics, they get a free uniform, they get fed on the days they work, and they get

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