Dana White has been adamant that UFC 249 and every other UFC event would go on as planned, despite the Coronavirus. In fact, White was planning on purchasing a private island so he could host all of his events during the pandemic. Well, none of those plans are going to come to fruition as it has been reported by Brett Okamoto of ESPN that UFC 249 is canceled and all other events are indefinitely being put on hold.
This news shouldn't be shocking to anyone especially when you consider how it was a pipe dream for the events to go on, in the first place. The headline fight was supposed to be Tony Ferguson and Khabib Nurmagomedov but because of the laws in Russia, Khabib couldn't leave the country. They replaced him with Justin Gaethje but fans weren't very excited about it.
White will certainly be giving more details for why he made this decision, in the future. At the end of the day, it would have been nice for the UFC to get us some live sports but at the same time, you need to make sure everyone is healthy and out of harms way. There would have been no way to juggle this had everything gone on as planned.
Hopefully, the state of the world can improve and the UFC can get back up and running again.