Over a year since the coronavirus first found its way to Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is acknowledging the seriousness of the problem as a fourth wave ravages the country due to the failure of the officials’ policy.
He said on Saturday: “We have a hard period ahead of us.”
The biggest issue is that mullahs’ used the pandemic to stop their overthrow, hoping that people would be too terrified of catching a deadly disease that had run rampant because the mullahs enforced no safety precautions to gather in large crowds and overthrow the government.
At first, shortly after the November 2019 and January 2020 major protests, the authorities denied that the virus was in the country at all, allowing it to spread silently. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei even called this virus a “test” and “blessing”, proving that he should not be trusted with the country.
Now, even officials and media outlets are terrified because it is backfiring on them. Predictably, the general public doesn’t like it when their rulers allow them to die en-masse when many deaths were preventable.
The state-run Jahan-e Sanat wrote last month: “Although the coronavirus crisis delays the conflict, delaying it at the cost of overwhelming issues is a challenge in society. In other words, when society is freed from the clutches of this disease, political, social, and economic faults will begin to move with greater destructive power.”
Another reason that anger is burning white-hot in the hearts of Iranians is that the Iranian Resistance has been exposing the government’s cover-up, which includes shifting blame to the people. All of this has increased infighting amongst the mullahs.
Mashhad’s Friday prayer leader Ahmad Alam-ol Hoda said: “Whatever they [Rouhani’s government officials] said was the opposite. They said the coronavirus is over. Then from where this fourth wave come from?”
While Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi said: “The National Covid-19 Combat Task Force refused to use [Persian New Year] holidays to control Covid-19 crisis.”
To sum up, Iranian officials are worried that this crisis will be the last straw and that the people will soon overthrow the government because they are terrified that the situation will only get worse with the mullahs in charge.
The Jahan-e Sanat paper wrote: “If crises pile up and the rulers do not listen to the voices of the protesters, the continuation of such a phenomenon can end the patience of the people. If there is no change in Iran soon, the mental state of the society will soon become more dangerous.”
