Over 251,000 Iranians have now died from coronavirus in Iran, according to the Iranian Resistance, while the Head of Iran’s Nursing Organization Mohammad Mirza Beigi reports that 80,000 nurses were infected and 8,000 cannot work right now because of it.
All of this displays the authorites’ cruelty in refusing to buy the vaccines to protect healthcare workers and the public.
Beigi told the Entekhab website on April 6 that four nurses are needed for every 1,000 citizens of a country, according to international standards, but there is less than one nurse per 1,000 citizens in Iran.
The nursing shortage isn’t a new thing. In 2018, Hossein-Ali Shahriari, the head of the Parliamentary Health Committee, said that across the public and private healthcare sectors, there was a “shortage of 80,000 to 150,000 nurses”, but it has been made worse because of the pandemic, with 10% of the staff out of commission and 110 nurses having died from COVID-19, according to Beigi.
Of course, since Beigi made these comments, the death toll for nurses has risen to 130 and may have increased since, according to the General Director of the Nurse’s House, who said that the delay in purchasing and distributing the vaccine is “massacring” nurses in hospitals.
On April 13, Mohammad Sharifi Moghadam said: “Unfortunately, in the past week, eight nurses in various cities died from COVID-19 and in light of the delay in the vaccination of nurses, it can be said that nurses are being massacred in hospitals. Unfortunately, with 130 dead nurses who were fighting COVID-19, we are among the countries with the most number of infections and deaths among nurses.”
Horrifically, the true number may be much higher because of the government secrecy surrounding COVID-19 deaths and infection.
Officials refuse to get the vaccines already approved by the World Health Organisation, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei expressly banning several of them in January, and is blaming the public for rising infections, saying that they don’t follow health protocols but now even the state-run media is pushing back.
The Jahan-e Sanat state-run daily wrote on April 8: “Everyone knows that during the past 14 months, the government has put preference over the economy to the lives and health of people, although the people are always the ones who are sacrificed.”
Hamid Emadi, a member of the COVID-19 Taskforce said on April 9, that the county would face “at least three difficult weeks filled with death” because conditions in hospitals were so bad.
