Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, February 7, 2021—During Saturday’s Covid-19 Task Force meeting, Iranian regime president Hassan Rouhani said, “Come this summer, domestic vaccines might be ready. But our facilities won’t allow us to have the shots delivered in one or two days. After the vaccine is ready, we will need five to six months.”
As has been the case with Rouhani in the past months, this is just another excuse to dither on vaccinating the Iranian population, which have so far suffered more than 212,000 casualties from the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s lack of response.
In December, Rouhani had claimed that the government is ready to purchase the vaccines and that the United States government is denying Iran access to coronavirus vaccines.
This lie was promptly debunked by the U.S. government and the World Health Organization, after which Rouhani came up with a new excuse: The transfer of the Pfizer vaccine requires specialized equipment that can maintain the vaccines at minus 70 degrees Celsius, which the regime does not have.
This lie was in turn rejected by the regime’s own authorities.
Next, Rouhani claimed that foreign banks will not extend credit to the regime since it is not part of the Financial Action Task Force. This lie was disseminated by government spokesperson Ali Rabiei, Rouhani’s chief of staff Mahmoud Vaezi, and Central Bank president Abdolnasser Hemati. But it soon became clear that this too was a lie because FATF restrictions do not apply to humanitarian issues. Subsequently, Hemati and health minister Saeed Namaki confessed that FATF does not pose serious restrictions on the purchase of vaccines.
On December 7, Rouhani said, “We will not let our people become the subjects of new coronavirus vaccine tests… If there’s a vaccine that can be trusted, we will purchase it.” And in the same breath, he said that his regime would not be purchasing vaccines from the U.S.
On January 1, Rouhani switched tone again and said, “We don’t know when this vaccine that we started will be developed. No one can say whether it will be ready six months later.”
In the weeks that followed, Rouhani made more promises of vaccines being jointly developed with other countries and another vaccine that will be readied by summer.
And now, he says that even if the vaccine is prepared by summer, it will need another seven, eight, or ten months to have the people vaccinated.
And given Rouhani’s history of pathological lying, one can only wonder at how reliable his latest promise is.
Meanwhile, some regime officials are confessing that there is no hurry to procure the vaccine. According to a report by the official IRNA news agency on February 3, Mohammad Reza Shanesaz, the president of the Food and Drug Organization, said, “The longer it takes [to purchase the vaccines] the lower the price of the vaccines will be. The faster we proceed, the higher the prices will be. The reason we don’t provide a clear answer is that we are negotiating.”
This happens while every day, hundreds of people are dying of Covid-19 in Iran, and while governments across the world are scrambling to get their population vaccinated as soon as possible. But for regime officials, the main issue is the purchase price.
The deeper reality, however, is that the regime simply doesn’t care how many people die of coronavirus in Iran. Contrary to other countries, where governments are united with their people to fight the pandemic, in Iran, the regime is aligned with the virus to kill the people.
Regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei downplayed the pandemic and even called it a blessing on separate occasions. He has refrained from allocating his huge financial and logistic resources to help the coronavirus response.
Khamenei even spun conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines manufactured in the U.S. and the UK and banned their purchase.
The truth is that Khamenei and Rouhani’s main worry is their hold on power. The coronavirus pandemic came at an opportune time for them, months after Iran saw the biggest nationwide uprising since the mullahs rose to power in 1979.
The regime’s strategy is to inflict maximum damage on the population with the Covid-19 outbreak to prevent the eruption of another round of mass protests.
For the Iranian people, who have suffered from human rights abuses, repression, poverty, unemployment, and government corruption for more than four decades, the regime’s abysmal coronavirus response is another reason to hate the mullahs’ rule and call for regime change.
Already, protests are taking shape in different cities, with workers, teachers, investors, pensioners, and members of every segment of the society taking to the streets to protest the regime’s corruption and repression.
The regime’s dithering on procuring the coronavirus vaccine might buy it another few months, but it is only a matter of time before it has to face the wrath of the people again. And even the regime’s own officials and media are warning that the next time the people’s rage explodes, it will be beyond anything the regime can control.
