: ‘It’s a Catastrophe.’ Iranians Turn to Black Market for Vaccines as COVID-19 Deaths Hit New Highs #WorldNEWS In January, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made the sudden announcement

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‘It’s a Catastrophe.’ Iranians Turn to Black Market for Vaccines as COVID-19 Deaths Hit New Highs #WorldNEWS
In January, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made the sudden announcement that American and British-made COVID-19 vaccines would be forbidden as they were completely untrustworthy.
Almost nine months later, Iran is facing its worst surge in the virus to date — a record number of deaths and infections per day with nearly 4. 2 million COVID-19 patients across the country, and a healthcare system near collapse. “It’s a catastrophe; and there is nothing we can do,” said an anesthesiology resident in one of Tehran’s public hospitals who due to the current surge is tasked to oversee the ICU ward for COVID-19 patients. “We can’t treat them nor help them; so all I can ask people to do is to stay home and do whatever it takes to not get exposed. ” The doctor requested anonymity in order to speak freely; others interviewed by TIME asked to be identified only by their first name.
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The scale of the crisis is such that doctors feel they have no choice but to speak openly about it, in a regime that ordinarily does not tolerate dissent. On Aug. 10, in an emotional plea for help in Iran’s second most populous city of Mashhad, Dr. Nafiseh Saghafi, the head of gynecology and obstetrics department of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences compared the city’s COVID-19 crisis to that of the horrors of war and begged authorities to do “whatever it takes to help save people’s lives. ” Speaking in an audio recording she described the scenes at her hospital (Quaem) a “devastating humanitarian crisis like no other. ”
To date, the Iranian government has reported approximately 93,000 COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. However, official death tolls are strongly disputed by physicians and ordinary Iranians. According to analysis published in Iran’s reformist Etemad newspaper on Aug. 14, based on the newly released statistics from the country’s “National Organization for Civil Registration,” fatalities caused by COVID-19 are in fact almost 194,000 — a number that some, including reformist politicians and former Presidential hopeful, Mostafa Tajzadeh, have compared to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.
Iran’s COVID-19 task force chief, Dr. Alireza Zali admitted on Aug. 11 that since the early days of the pandemic Iran had declined to cooperate with the World Health Organization (WHO), to report accurate statistics on the number of infections and deaths, or spend money on buying vaccines.
In what has become an ongoing public spat among exiting and sitting government officials, Zali’s remarks were immediately challenged by the outgoing Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif.

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