Kourosh Ziabari – Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington: The tidal wave of the coronavirus pandemic is subsiding. Increasingly countries are returning to normalcy as vaccinations and herd immunity are prevailing, and states are beginning to bounce back from the throes of the crisis. In Iran, the second country in the Middle East to confirm a coronavirus case, and once a hotspot of contagion, the government’s idiosyncratic response to the health emergency and its ideological handling of the immunization plans still resonates with many as the symptom of a broader malaise: the perception that to the government, politics supersede Iranian lives.
It remains unclear when the first case was diagnosed versus what was reported publicly as February 19, 2020. But the authorities had taken the gravity of the threat of the coronavirus so lightly that Iran soon gained notoriety for proliferating conspiracy theories and anti-science, allegedly leading to thousands of preventable deaths. Officials, establishment pundits, and high-ranking clerics insinuated that Iran’s adversaries inflated the threat of the coronavirus in a plot to intimidate people into staying home and refraining from casting their ballots in the February 21, 2020 parliamentary elections, and that no viral disease existed that warranted a national response. After Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remarked February 23, 2020 that the spread of the coronavirus was “a good excuse” exploited by the “enemies” to dissuade people from voting a couple of days earlier, clerics close to him, government authorities, and state media followed suit collectively, dismissing the pandemic entirely.
Shortly after the first coronavirus vaccines were developed in August 2020, as countries rushed to place orders in anticipation of ferocious competition, Iran declared publicly that it would not import vaccines manufactured in the United States, Britain, or France. The supreme leader announced the ban in a polemical speech January 7, 2021. His argument was premised on the skepticism he said shaped his views of these countries and the avowal that if the U.S.- and UK-made vaccines were of any use, they would wind up saving the lives of American and British people. Then, several pro-establishment physicians and think tank members began to slander vaccines churned out in the United States and Britain, which they accused of being genetically modified and designed in specific formulations to contaminate and kill Iranians. Iran’s current health minister, Bahram Einollahi, was among 2,500 doctors who signed an open letter to then-President Hassan Rouhani warning him against purchasing vaccines designed by the United States and U.K., raising stern misgivings about the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility, the global initiative aimed at equitable access to coronavirus vaccines.
The Rouhani administration had a different stance and wished to expedite Iranian vaccinations using the WHO-approved products, but it couldn’t override the supreme leader’s ruling. Iranians, however, weren’t convinced. In reaction to the government refusing to purchase Western-manufactured vaccines, Iranians launched a sweeping online campaign urging the government to start buying Pfizer, Oxford/AstraZeneca, and other reliable vaccines.
Rejecting vaccines from certain countries in the face of unchecked waves of contagion seemed to most observers a judgment that was purely politically motivated and disregarded the potentially huge ripple effects on the people’s health. But in an undemocratic setting, there was no one to challenge the decision.
Thousands of Iranians thronged to neighboring Armenia as the government there had offered free vaccinations for international visitors. At one point, the Norduz-Agarak land crossing was so jampacked with Iranian cars that the Armenian government imposed a 10-day stay requirement before visitors could receive their shots.
Iran also harbored ambitions to domestically manufacture vaccines. Iranian medical institutions were commissioned to kickstart work on releasing vaccines, to be emblematic of the country’s scientific self-sufficiency, and the public was actively encouraged to use those brands to buoy up the spirit of nationalism.
Large budgets were allocated to pharmaceutical companies that had pledged to saturate the country’s drugstores with millions of doses of home-made vaccines labeled as significantly more effective than their foreign rivals. In one instance, Barkat Pharmed Co., a subsidiary of the Executive Headquarters of Imam’s Directive (Setad), operating under the aegis of the supreme leader, committed to distribute at least 120 million doses of its COVIran Barekat vaccine, of which 50 million doses were scheduled to be available by September 2021. As of July 2022, only 60 million doses were produced and less than 12 million doses administered.
Despite a formidable atmosphere of ambiguity around the finances of Barkat, the Ministry of Health has reportedly allocated at least $1 billion of subsidized foreign currency to Setad to complete its work on manufacturing the much-hyped national vaccine. Yet, while a dose of a typical coronavirus vaccine in Europe and the United States is estimated at about $3 to $15, the cost of COVIran Barekat is typically $47 per dose for the producer, an indication of how cost ineffective it has been for the government and consumers whose taxes have gone to bankroll the project. The production line of another homegrown vaccine, Fakhra, sponsored by the Ministry of Defense, was suspended seven months after it was set in motion, with its executives citing “lack of demand” as the reason.
Iranian authorities have also failed to secure approval by the WHO for their variegated vaccines banged out within notably short spans of time. This means for every Iranian citizen who has received domestic vaccines, international travel has been a challenge; nearly 6,500 pilgrims who had planned to perform the hajj earlier this year were cautioned by the Saudi authorities before they traveled to immunize themselves with WHO-approved vaccines, or they wouldn’t be allowed into the kingdom. A Washington Post investigative story lifted the veil on rampant corruption and embezzlement in the process of the production of Iranian vaccines, circumvention of scientific protocols to accelerate the securing of funding, and misleading publicity to convince people the unknown vaccines were dependable, only because they were profitable projects.
Iran politicized its response to the coronavirus after it turned out to be unable to treat its emergence as a purely scientific phenomenon. Official statistics estimate deaths attributable to the coronavirus in Iran at nearly 144,000, which is higher than any other Middle Eastern country and the 12th-highest toll globally. Some claim the actual rates, not reported by the government, are much higher. The Iranian government’s botched handling of the pandemic exposed its limited ability to address episodes of national crisis, its aberrant guidelines of governance, and the long way it needs to travel before it becomes a functioning state responsibly administering to the needs of its population, suffering from years of unremitting economic sanctions and maladministration at home.
This article was originally published in the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington