Chairman of Iran Medical Council criticized National Task Force for not including physicians in their decisions and making wrong ones for more than 10 months, costing thousands of Iranians their lives. Dr. Zafarghandi said, “The lockdown plan was implemented very late, it could have been done months ago which would have saved many lives,” including more than 300 members of the council! He called importing COVID-19 vaccine to Iran a “vital priority”, adding more confusion to the chaotic situation!
According to him, at least 50,000,000 doses are needed right now and must be purchased by the officials in the next 3 months, otherwise, immunization in 8 months is useless and would not be effective. Zafarghandi mentioned vaccination is the best opportunity to achieve herd immunity and for that 65% of the population must be immunized! However, his estimation of 50 million doses would only cover about 35% of the entire population which will not be helpful in stopping coronavirus spread or hundreds of deaths a day!
Zafarghandi cleared another question, he said Islamic Republic would be buying from WHO COVAX program which will be mostly the Chinese and Oxford versions. However, many countries, including Iraq and Venezuela have already purchased Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine! He admitted some countries such as Canada have bought vaccines as many as 7 times their population. He also refuted Saeed Namaki and other officials who have been telling people “domestic coronavirus vaccine is on the way” by saying, “Having the knowledge to create few doses of vaccine is very different from mass production! The production needs special equipment which Iran doesn’t have. We shouldn’t wait for the domestic one, we need to import the vaccine as soon as possible.”
In the meantime, Saeed Namaki addressed people on “Nurse Day” on TV promising there is good news about the vaccine made in Iran in the next few days. “We will also import COVID-19 vaccine from the best sources possible.” As usual, he didn’t offer any details. He also admitted that other countries, including Russia, are involved in producing vaccine.
On the other hand, Ali Motaheri, former “Parliament rep”, claimed refusing to pass FATF laws has caused the pre-ordered vaccines from COVAX have been lost even though Islamic Republic had paid for it! He didn’t elaborate on how this is possible.
According to the Ministry of Health undercounted and manipulated data, the number of deaths has increased from the day before. Sima Sadat Lari announced 191 deaths in the past 24 hours in Iran while 6,151 new coronavirus infections have been recorded. Testing remains in the same range. The number of counties in different “color” status hasn’t changed since yesterday.
Basic Reproduction Rate (R0) and graphs continue to be the best indicators of human catastrophe in the past 10months in Iran.
R0: 4.44
Total: 1,164,535 (+6,151)
Dead: 53,816 (+191)
Recovered: 894,366
Critical: 5,519 (-44)
Admitted: 216,353 (-3,352)
Tests: 7,097,556 (8.5% of the population, assuming each test was performed on 1 person)
Cover: Mahnaz Dezhban
