September 3, 2021
by Warren L. Nelson
With the current surge in the coronavirus producing case counts and a death toll far higher than ever before, the new government of President Raisi has shifted from talk about domestically-made vaccines asolving the problem to announcing plans to make imports of foreign-made vaccines a national priority.
Not only is the Health Ministry talking about vaccine imports, but also the new foreign minister, Hossain Amir-Abdollahian, announced on his first day in office that he was creating a headquarters within the ministry to expedite imports.
According to the Health Ministry, 28 million doses of various foreign vaccines had been imported before the cabinet took office. So, that will be the baseline by which to judge the expedited import plans.
As for shots administered, as of August 26, when the new cabinet took office, the government said it had given 24.9 million shots 17.8 million first doses and 7.1 million second doses.
Meanwhile, the new health minister, Bahram Eyenollahi, pledged that the country’s entire “target” population would be vaccinated by February 11, 2022, just five months away. That is an ambitious goal. The vaccination program began last December, and only 24.9 million doses have been given in the eight months since then, or about 3 million doses a month. With the “target” population totaling 60 million of Iran’s 84 million people, that will mean giving 19 million doses a month over the next five months operating at more than six times the rate of the past.
Eyenollahi said Iran could not produce all the required vaccines and would have to import more.
The public and much of the regime want to re-open the country as the public has clearly wearied of the restrictions prompted by the epidemic. But it isn’t off to a good start. The regime scheduled all schools across the country to re-open as per usual on September 23. But on September 4, the government announced the school reopenings would be postponed. (See story on Page 12.) Schools, for the most part, have been closed since February 2020.
The fifth and, by far, the worst surge in the epidemic is continuing, as can be seen dramatically in the charts accompanying this article. The total number of cases reported by the government passed 5 million on September 1, meaning 6 percent of the population has been infected. The death toll passed 110,000 September 4.
The daily death toll has been among the world’s top 10 every day since August 1 and on about half the days since then Iran has actually had a higher death toll than the United States, despite the fact that the United States has four times the population of Iran.
The total number of deaths is the 13th highest in the world, and the total number of cases is the 10th highest. But the number of deaths per million population is 48th in the world. That, however, means Iran has the worst death rate in all of Asia, where the coronavirus has been less deadly than on the other continents.
It is accepted by everyone that Iran’s numbers are low and the government does not capture all the cases and all the deaths from the coronavirus. That, however, is true everywhere. The main problem with the Iranian statistics as with the stats from many other countries is that they only gather the numbers from hospitals and thus those who stay sick at home or die at home are not recorded.
As for the low number of imported vaccines, many in the regime have tried to blame US sanctions, although the World Health Organization (WHO) said as long ago as December that it had cleared all issues with Washington and there were no impediments for any anyone to ship vaccines to Iran.
Recently, some private sector officials in Iran have turned on the government saying that it is Iran’s slow bureaucratic import procedures that have left Iran short of vaccines.
For example, Masud Khan-sari, president of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, recently said the Chamber arranged to import many doses but the sellers said the government must first approve the sale so they would know that the vaccines would be accepted. Khansari said the invoice was good for a week, but the government was still mulling whether to approve the import after a month. Khansari said such “bureaucratic barriers” are at fault for blocking vaccine imports.
Nasser Riahi, chairman of the Iranian Pharmaceutical Importers Association, said the government has now agreed to allow American-developed vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to be imported into Iran (as long as they are not actually manufactured in the United States). He said those firms are now ready to ship 60 million does but because Iran has not yet developed the scale of refrigeration required by those brands, “it might take months” before they ever reach Iran.
Ali Sarzaeem, an economist, said another problem is that the regime still puts its ideology of autarky or self-sufficiency above the needs of the people and has made developing and making vaccines in Iran a higher priority than getting vaccines into people’s arms.
Meanwhile, adding to the criticism, the Customs Administration announced August 15 that some 18 million tons of covid-related pharmaceutical materials were piled up unclaimed at the Imam Khomeini International Airport.
In a report from Human Rights Watch, researcher Tara Sepehri Far said, “Iranian authorities cannot blame sanctions to excuse their mismanagement of the covid-19 pandemic. Iranians need and deserve better from their government.”
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi in January banned the import of American vaccines—which the authorities have now interpreted to mean American-MADE vaccines, but not American-DEVELOPED vaccines. The Supreme Leader has not questioned that new interpretation of his words.
Meanwhile, Major General Hossain Salami, commander of the Pasdaran, has said, “What guarantee is there that the United States, the number one enemy of this nation, won’t give us vaccines that cause paralysis.” Salami did not mention that the Islamic Republic has been buying medical goods from the United States ever since the revolution.
The government imposed a six-day national lockdown from August 22 through August 27 in an effort to halt the spread of the disease. Some suspected the government was trying to demonstrate tough action against the epidemic rather than really doing anything serious. The lockdown corresponded to the Moharram religious holidays and simply added two days to the holiday shutdown. What’s more, the businesses that were ordered to close encompass just 60 percent of all businesses, according to the Financial Tribune, leaving a great many operating—assuming the regulations were actually enforced.
Furthermore, while the government ordered the shutdown during the Moharram high holidays, it did not ban mourning ceremonies that draw hundreds of thousands. It ordered that no such mourning ceremonies be held indoors, but many news reports said that order was ignored by many clerics organizing mourning events. Furthermore, the outdoor events drew huge numbers of people who were in close proximity to one another and rarely wore masks.
According to a document produced by outgoing Health Minister Saeed Namaki, of 2.75 million Iranians who had received two shots of the vaccine when he spoke, 17,000 were hospitalized with covid symptoms and 2,000 of those died. Dr. Mohammad-Reza Mahboubfar, a viral epidemiologist and former member of the National Coronavirus Task Force, told IranWire the global mortality rate among those with two doses is about 10 per million—but in Iran, given Namaki’s figures, he said it is 753 per million or more than 75 times the global average.
Mahboubfar also said there is much vaccine hesitancy in Iran. He said 40 percent of those eligible for shots have not gone to vaccine centers when notified of available doses.
IranWire also pointed to the “misinformation” peddled by promoters of “Islamic medicine” who have been urging the public to drink camel urine or place cotton soaked with violet oil in the anus.
Mahboubfar also pointed to a study conducted in Hungary, which he said shows the efficacy of the Chinese Sinopharm and Russian Sputnik V vaccines to be only 50 percent to 60 percent effective against the original virus and much lower against the newer Delta variant that is the main one Iran is facing at the moment.
As for the city counts on how bad the epidemic is, since mid-August there has not been a single city listed as “blue,” indicating a city where the disease is under control. As of late August, 359 cities were in the “red” category for the worst situation where the disease is out of control, and 59 were rated orange and 30 yellow, indicating cities with less severe conditions
When it comes to the production of the first Iranian-developed vaccine, CovIran Barekat, there is no shortage of statistics but many of them are contradictory.
On August 3, Mohammad-Hossain Fallah-Mehrabadi, vice president of the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute, said, “So far, less than a million doses have been made domestically.”
But the very next day, Ali-Reza Vahabzadeh, an adviser at the Health Ministry, said that as of that date five million doses of Cov-Iran Barekat had been manufactured and 1.8 delivered to the Health Ministry. Kianoush Jahanpour, spokesman for Iran’s Food and Drug Administration, said that as of August 4, 861,372 doses of Cov-Iran Barekat had been administered to the public.
Back on April 22, then Health Minister Saeed Namaki said that within two weeks, Iran would open a production line for the Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine. More than four months have now passed and there is still no Sputnik V being made in Iran.
