Iran’s Ban On Vaccines Led To 75,000 More Covid Deaths - New Research
A team of medical experts in a damning report claim that over 75,000 Covid deaths could have been prevented in Iran if the regime had permitted global vaccines.
A team of medical experts in a damning report claim that over 75,000 Covid deaths could have been prevented in Iran if the regime had permitted global vaccines.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ruled out importing United States and British made Covid vaccines in January 2021, arguing that Western countries could not be trusted and Iran was well placed to develop its own vaccines or should take them from more reliable sources.
At the time, the US-German Pfizer, US-made Moderna and the British-made AstraZeneca were the only vaccines approved internationally.
But in a new paper published in association with the British Medical Journal and Yale called, ‘A quantitative evaluation of the impact of vaccine roll-out rate and coverage on reducing deaths from COVID-19: a counterfactual study on the impact of the delayed vaccination programme in Iran,’ a team of experts have found evidence to show mass neglect on the part of the regime.
The paper, compiled by experts of Iranian descent, Mahan Ghafari, Sepanta Hosseinpour, Mohammad Saeid Rezaee-Zavareh, Stefan Dascalu, Somayeh Rostamian, Kiarash Aramesh, Kaveh Madani and Shahram Kordasti, compared Iran with eight model countries with similar income brackets and dominant COVID-19 vaccine types.
The analysis revealed that faster roll-outs were associated with higher numbers of averted deaths. "While Iran's percentage of fully vaccinated individuals would have been similar to Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey under counterfactual roll-out rates, adopting Turkey's rates could have averted up to 50,000 more deaths, whereas following Bangladesh's rates could have led to up to 52,800 additional loss of lives in Iran,” said the paper.
“Also, following Bahrain's model as an upper bound benchmark, Iran could have averted 75,300 deaths throughout the pandemic, primarily in the under 50 age groups.”
Just last year, it was announced in a shock move that Iran's Judiciary had accepted a lawsuit against the Supreme Leader and others for delay in mass vaccination and thousands of preventable deaths.
The 22-page litigation called for the prosecution of Khamenei and other officials, including former president Hassan Rouhani and member of the National Coronavirus Combat Taskforce, for "manslaughter of over 100,000 Iranians." Lawyers who filed the case, Mohammad-Reza Faghihi and Arash Kaykhosravi, were among six people arrested in August 2021 apparently after meeting to discuss their legal action over Covid, but later freed.
While Khamenei banned the Western vaccines, hundreds of millions of dollars were distributed among government-run companies with no experience in vaccine development to produce a homegrown variant.
One vaccine that was introduced into the local market in June 2021 was Barakat, developed by an affiliate of the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order Foundation, a charitable-cum-business entity controlled by Khamenei’s office. As a result, Iran, which was receiving very few vaccines from Russia and China until August lost precious months to vaccinate the majority of its population.
The Barakat vaccine with delays in production has only been used for inoculating a fraction of the population. Critics call these decisions and failures “Covid mismanagement”, which the lawsuit tried to pursue.
Vaccination suddenly jumped in August with Chinese and AstraZeneca vaccines, as the Khamenei ban was rescinded when Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei’s candidate for president assumed office. Figures of total deaths are unclear due to the secretive nature of the regime, but officially stand around 150,000 according to declared numbers given to the World Health Organization.
Human Rights Watch called Khamenei’s ban “moves to politicize vaccine acquisition” but acknowledged that US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions thwarted Iran’s access to vaccines.
This assessment is also questionable, because medicines are exempt from US sanctions and Iran regularly imports billions of dollars of drugs and raw material to produce medication from Europe, India and elsewhere.
A ceremony to present Fattah missile on Tuesday was attended by President Ebrahim Raisi, Revolutionary Guards Chief Commander Major General Hossein Salami, and IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh as well as a dozen other senior officials.
Boastful statements by IRGC commanders about the unprecedented level of cooperation between the Raisi administration and the IRGC, which – given the occasion it was announced – will work as a prod to heighten Western concerns about Iran's missile capabilities.
Iran claims its hypersonic missile has a range of 1,400 kilometers, can breach and overcome all anti-missile shields, and hits speeds of Mach 13-15, which means about 13 to 15 times faster than the speed of sound -- known as Mach 1.
Currently available technology perhaps support hypersonic missiles flying at 5-8 Machs, so Iran's claim of 15 mach speed seems an exaggeration.
For a missile to be called hypersonic, it should fly at least five times faster than the speed of sound. The threshold of Mach 5 is used because a range of physical effects start becoming a significant engineering challenge at that speed.
In addition, a true hypersonic missile should also be maneuverable to be useful, which poses a significant challenge not only to Iran but even for great military powers, such as the United States, which still has not fielded such a weapon.
The term is also used generally to refer to two types of weapons that are being developed through contemporary defense programs: Hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs). It is not clear which type Fattah is. However, since Iran described it as ballistic, it is most probably an HGV.
But even that description is misleading. An HGV is a relatively large projectile lifted by a ballistic missile into the atmosphere, which at a certain point begins gliding toward its target.
An HCM is a cruise missile, which means it does not glide but is self-propelled at a hypersonic speed.
No Iranian official has elaborated on when Fattah would hit hypersonic speed: during its first phase of flight powered by a ballistic missile, or when it is gliding toward the target.
Unless Iranian authorities say at what altitude the missile will hit Mach 15, the claim is not even verifiable.
The IRGC claims that with a solid fuel propulsion system and a second-stage mobile nozzle, the missile has the ability to reach very high speeds and perform various maneuvers in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere in order to overcome all types of air defense systems. Hajizadeh saying Iran is now among only four countries that have the technology to manufacture hypersonic missiles. He did not name the countries he had in mind.
According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the reports about such missiles demonstrate how confusing -- and potentially distorting -- the term ‘hypersonic’ is, noting that some of the news coverage of similar events have indicated “a lack of understanding of the different types of ‘hypersonic missiles’, the role of their speed and maneuvering capabilities, the physics behind them, and their military capabilities and missions.”
Hajizadeh added that unlike other types of missiles, Fattah cannot be countered by any defense system, noting that the hypersonic missile cannot be destroyed by any missile due to its cross-range maneuvers, meaning movement in various directions and heights.
However, a Brookings Institution report in May– titled ‘Don’t believe the hypersonic hype’ -- , debunked several such claims, and mentioned the case of the Russian Kinzhal missile, which President Vladimir Putin had announced in 2018 as a “hypersonic” weapon that could overcome all existing air defense systems. However, in May, Ukraine used US-supplied Patriot batteries to down several Kinzhals, shattering the myth of a Russian hypersonic weapon.
SIPRI says that the questioning why certain actors adopt this terminology – given a lack of understanding of the limitations of this descriptor -- can “help reveal motivations and vested interests in the hype around hypersonic missiles, i.e. to appear threatening.”
Highlighting that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has supported and approved the missile activities and even has chosen the name 'Fattah’ -- which means ‘the opener,’ Hajizadeh said “Our activities in this field do not end with the manufacturing of this missile. We will continue this path so that no enemy even imagines attacking Iran.”