Japan airline ANA begins workplace vaccination

Japanese airline ANA began vaccinating its pilots and cabin attendants at Tokyo's Haneda Airport on Sunday.

Fifty members of staff working on international flights were inoculated with the Moderna jab. The company aims to scale up vaccinations to 300 per day.

Japan has been scrambling to catch up with a slow vaccination drive ahead of the Olympic games next moth.

Medical experts have warned of a risk of the games becoming an incubator for "a Tokyo variant," as 15,000 foreign athletes and tens of thousands officials, sponsors and journalists from about 200 countries descend on — and potentially mix with — a largely unvaccinated population.

ANA's senior vice president Juichi Hirasawa said the company was seeking to "cooperate as much as possible" with efforts to help athletes get around and curb infections at airports and on flights.

The Olympics are set to open on July 23. Tokyo and several other prefectures are under a state of emergency until June 20.