Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani says even if Covid vaccine is read by summer, it will take until 2022 to distribute.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani told a Covid-19 Task Force meeting on Saturday that even if domestic vaccines are ready by the summer, it would take “five to six months” to distribute them.
With over 212,000 Covid-19 deaths in Iran so far, the people cannot wait that long and the Iranian Resistance said that this was “just another excuse to dither on vaccinating the Iranian population”.
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Why Iran Does Not Purchase Covid-19 Vaccines
In December, Rouhani said that the Iranian regime was ready to buy the vaccines approved by the World Health Organization but that this was being blocked by the US, something the US and the WHO debunked.
Then, it was the Iran didn’t have the equipment to transport the Pfizer vaccine at minus 70 degrees Celsius, something other Iranian officials denied. Then, it was that foreign banks wouldn’t give Iran credit because it wasn’t part of the Financial Action Task Force, but after FAFT denied this, Central Bank president Abdolnasser Hemati and health minister Saeed Namaki admitted that this was also incorrect.
Finally, it was that the vaccine was not safe and that Iran didn’t want its people to be guinea pigs, even though by this point, the UK was about ready to start administering it en-masse to its citizens following clinical trials of thousands of people. The import of the US and UK-made vaccines were also banned. At this point, Rouhani promised a domestic vaccine by the summer.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) wrote: “Now, he says that even if the vaccine is prepared by summer, it will need another seven, eight, or ten months to have the people vaccinated. And given Rouhani’s history of pathological lying, one can only wonder at how reliable his latest promise is.”
Other regime officials, like Mohammad Reza Shanesaz, the president of the Food and Drug Organization, are admitting that they are delaying vaccine purchases to get a better price, as if this is a gaming system and not lifesaving medicine. It’s also a bizarre take considering that the economy will rebound quicker if the population is vaccinated and herd immunity is achieved.
In this regard, the MEK wrote: “The deeper reality, however, is that the regime simply doesn’t care how many people die of coronavirus in Iran. Contrary to other countries, where governments are united with their people to fight the pandemic, in Iran, the regime is aligned with the virus to kill the people. Regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei downplayed the pandemic and even called it a blessing on separate occasions. He has refrained from allocating his huge financial and logistic resources to help the coronavirus response.”
But why? Probably because in November 2019, just before the pandemic, Iran saw the biggest nationwide anti-regime protests ever and the mullahs are scared that without the threat of the coronavirus, the people will rise up again.
