should is a powerful word.
It becomes a problem if/when people point out maybe instead of facilitating participation in the Olympics, the IOC should be directing those vaccines to the hardest hit countries instead.
Prioritising Olympic athletes is a good idea, they have much more interaction with people as well as travelling internationally.
The vast majority of Olympic athletes are only travelling internationally for the Olympics alone. And the vast majority have not had much interaction with other people outside their countries except at the Olympics.
That’s on top of the debate about whether they should be held or not. But if they should, it is still a valid criticism that the IOC should not get special access to the limited supply of vaccines when the majority of participant nations can hardly get any to begin with.
While the goal of COVAX was to transcend borders and ensure equitable and widespread availability of vaccines to all nations, in practice, the wealthy nations have gotten almost all of them and poorer nations have gotten the leavings.
It would be a violation of the Olympic spirit for the IOC to perpetuate this inequity. And the cost of prioritizing Olympians (and supporting personnel at the games) is literally human lives. Maybe you consider that a worthy trade, but that’s a heck of something for an organization dedicated to international understanding to tell the majority of those nations that it considers itself more important than them.
They could still very easily make a rule that anyone who has the opportunity to be vaccinated but hasn’t isn’t allowed to go. They obviously didn’t make such a rule, but they very easily could have.