Coronavirus: US Sanctions Hurting Iran's Response?

Back in October was my last blog post on COVID-19 and Iran. At the time, I discussed a director of the oldest hospital in Tehran who predicted that there would be 300,000 deaths in Iran if the disease continued for another 18 months. I was a touch skeptical of that claim. I know that official reports aren't accurate in Iran, but I was concluding that there were likely less than 60,000 deaths in the country at the time. Per Worldometer, the official deaths have not yet reached 60,000, but based on my October analysis deaths are probably closer to 90,000. Could Iran reach 300,000 deaths by March 2022? I think it is still a stretch. Even so, the disease may continue to spread for a much longer period of time in Iran due to US sanctions. Two of the below articles discuss this topic.

Associated Press (Dec 9) reports:

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that U.S. sanctions are making it difficult for Iran to purchase medicine and health supplies from abroad, including COVID-19 vaccines needed to contain the worst outbreak in the Middle East.

. . . While the United States insists that medicines and humanitarian goods are exempt from sanctions, restrictions on trade have made many banks and companies across the world hesitant to do business with Iran, fearing punitive measures from Washington. The country is also cut off from the international banking system, making it difficult to transfer payments.

CNN (Dec 10) adds:

"Iran is hampered by sanctions that prevent it from accessing foreign reserves, foreign currency abroad to purchase the necessary medical equipment -- masks, anything that it might need to take care of its population," Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert with the UK think tank Chatham House, told CNN earlier this year.

The spaces for those who lose the fight are an hour across town. The uniform, tidy graves of the Behest-e-Zahra cemetery are swallowed in the reverberating and haunting chants of imams working overtime to pray for the endless stream of shrouded corpses.

Okay, first both the Associated Press and CNN report on sanctions one after the other. Hmm. Does make you think that there is an attempted PR full court press going on to argue for the easing of sanctions just as vaccines are are getting approved (the Pfizer vaccine was approved on Dec 11th in the US and on Dec 2nd in the UK). 

At a minimum, I would hope that the United States allows vaccines to get shipped into Iran. Due to the fact that many countries have already bought up a lot of the initial supply, Iran may not be in line to get any until the Biden administration. One would hope that the Biden administration will not stand in the way of allowing vaccines into the country and will in fact encourage various pharma corporations to ship into the country. Best case is that the Trump administration starts to strongly encourage specific corporations to work with Iran. I don't see why the administration can't go to 3M and say, "Hey, ship some N95 masks in and don't worry about it."

Iran did cause some of their own grief due to their response to the pandemic as the Associated Press (Dec 16) reports:

Meanwhile, Iran’s own response has been hampered in part by mixed messages as the crisis worsened in the fall. The country requested aid from the international community, then revoked an offer allowing Doctors Without Borders to work in Isfahan. Khamenei also refused U.S. aid, citing a baseless conspiracy theory claiming the virus could be man-made by America. 

In October, Health Minister Saeed Namaki warned of “hospitals full of patients,” but then the next day reportedly said: “We should never announce that we don’t have empty beds. We do have empty beds.” Authorities ordered face masks to be worn, then set the cash fine at just 500,000 rials, or $1.60. All as Iran hit ever-increasing records for its reported daily deaths and case counts — numbers long suspected of being below the true toll of the pandemic.