How favoritism trumped science in Iran's covid response
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Today on Post Reports, how government officials in Iran cut corners to expedite a yet-unproven vaccine developed by a company close to the supreme leader.
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Last year, as Iranian regulators considered endorsing a locally developed coronavirus vaccine, a top health official issued a warning, saying the test results were insufficient, and the vaccine’s approval could undermine efforts to contain the deadly spread of covid throughout Iran.
But the vaccine had influential backers – it was the highly touted project of a company called Barkat, part of a corporate empire close to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Business reporter Yeganeh Torbati reports that government officials cut corners to expedite the yet-unproven vaccine, even as the supreme leader barred the import of some Western-made vaccines, and imports of other vaccines encountered delays.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So recently I was talking to my friend, Yagan Eturbadi. |
| 0:05.9 | She's a reporter here at the post on the business desk. |
| 0:08.7 | And since the beginning of the pandemic, she has been fascinated by how Iran has handled |
| 0:14.1 | COVID. |
| 0:15.6 | Iran was one of the first countries outside of China and really the first in the Middle |
| 0:20.4 | East to have a major outbreak of the pandemic. |
| 0:23.7 | People were getting sick, dying, hospitals were overwhelmed with patients. |
| 0:29.3 | We even saw the digging of these sort of mass trenches for victims of the coronavirus |
| 0:35.6 | in one city. |
| 0:36.7 | So it really was quite a tragic situation there. |
| 0:39.8 | I also remember this, watching the news and seeing those mass trenches in Iran. |
| 0:45.2 | It felt like what I was watching was this possible canary in the coal mine of how bad |
| 0:49.7 | COVID could get here in the US. |
| 0:54.7 | Iran has the worst COVID outbreak in the Middle East. |
| 0:57.7 | It's now struggling with a lethal new wave of infections. |
| 1:01.6 | And though Iran's government was criticized in the early days of the pandemic for being |
| 1:05.7 | slow to recognize it for the emergency that it really was, eventually they did move to |
| 1:11.0 | a strategy of lockdowns and masking. |
| 1:14.5 | And then as time went on, just like in other parts of the world, the attention of the government |
| 1:19.4 | really shifted to vaccination and mass vaccination as a way of controlling the pandemic. |
| 1:27.1 | Calling a COVID vaccine is, as we know, already pretty complicated. |
| 1:31.6 | But in Iran, there was another layer of complication because of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali |
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