Olympic Gold Medalist Says He’d Rather Not Compete than Take Covid Vaccine

An Olympic gold medalist says he’d rather sit the games out if taking a Covid vaccine is required in order to compete in the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

Champion Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake made the statement to Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner over the weekend.

“My mind still stays strong, I don’t want any vaccine,” Blake said. “I’d rather miss the Olympics than take the vaccine. I am not taking it,” he stated.

“I don’t really want to get into it now, but I have my reasons.”

Blake’s statements follow a tweet he published Saturday, in which he told his followers to “have a mind of your own.”

“In life, you are what you think you are, not what people think you are,” Blake tweeted. “Don’t follow the crowd. Have a mind of your own. Love and value yourself!”

The track and field runner, who once competed against the “fastest man in the world” Usain Bolt, will likely not be excluded from the games this summer as the International Olympic Committee has merely “encouraged” participants take the vaccine.

The vaccine effort in the United States, meanwhile, has seen considerable pushback from the black community, with many distrustful of the government after the Tuskegee experiments, in which the US Public Health Service, from 1932 to 1972, conducted illegal testing of the STD syphilis on human subjects — often without offering them treatment after the fact.

This article originally appeared on Infowars.