Efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine continue around the world, with experts agreeing that the pandemic cannot be tackled without one. According to Dr. Minoo Moharez, a member of the National Coronavirus Taskforce’s Scientific Committee, more than 140 countries are currently pursuing a vaccine, and in most cases the animal testing phase had been concluded successfully. A made-in-Iran vaccine has been successfully tested on animals and clinical testing on humans has begun and will last several months, she said.
However, a vaccine, made in Iran or anywhere else, can be deployed only if one of the three scientific authorities in the world — the World Health Organization, the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency — gives its seal of approval. Moharez said the Russian-manufactured vaccine had not received such approval and, consequently, cannot be used in Iran, a comment that undermined hopes expressed a few days earlier by Iranian officials.
Dr. Alireza Biglari, president of Iran’s Pasteur Institute, told a press conference: “I am not sure this disease can have a conclusive vaccine because we have seen that some patients have been infected with coronavirus for a second time.” A key factor, he said, is how long immunity from a vaccine could last.
A vaccine would not only save lives, it would also help save the economies of various countries around the world that have been most hard hit by the pandemic and suffer from widespread unemployment as a result. Citing a report by the Iranian parliament’s Research Center, Roozbeh Kardooni, head of the Social Security Research Institute, said that in the last six months, as a best-case scenario, 2.9 million people have lost their jobs in Iran, and in the worst-case scenario, 6.4 million had been made unemployed. According to him, the people who have lost their jobs worked for a fifth of the Iranian businesses that have been battered by the pandemic. He said that a report by the Economic Department of the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare revealed that 4.8 million jobs, 20.3 percent of the total number of jobs in Iran, had been lost due to coronavirus.
Hunger Strikes
Seventy-two political prisoners who have been detained for partaking in the November 2019 protests are taking part in a hunger strike over coronavirus fears at the Greater Tehran Penitentiary, according to reports from the Iran Human Rights Monitor (HRM).
The prisoners announced in a letter on August 16 that they started a hunger strike to protest against being denied leaves of absence during the coronavirus pandemic and against poor prison conditions. The strikers refused meals on the same day and pledged to continue their protest until their demands are met.
“We started to strike today to protest against the violations of the political prisoners’ rights and the authorities’ insistence on imprisoning justice-seeking people in these deplorable health conditions and in this remote prison, which lacks the necessary standards for human care,” their letter read. “ None of us are criminals and we have the right to protest. The people who cause inflation and a catastrophic economic situation are the criminals.”
“We demand our rights and the rights of the affected people,” the letter continued. “We demanded our lives and were sentenced to gradual death in this exile where there are no basic facilities for human living.”
Mourning Ceremonies
There appear to be no prospects of the virus’ second wave coming to an end in Iran. Given this, plans to go ahead with mourning ceremonies for the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, due to begin on August 20, continue to be controversial. In the latest chapter of the controversy, Ahmad Khatami (no relation to former President Mohammad Khatami), a member of the Assembly of Experts, accused a group of people who had spoken out against the ceremonies taking place during the pandemic of being hostile to Muharram ceremonies in general. While Khatami conceded that some people were not biased and were only opposing the ceremonies because of the pandemic but he did single out some, scolding and belittling them by saying that the“brutish” Reza Shah Pahlavi, the king of Iran from 1925 to 1941, had been more powerful than they were. Nonetheless, he said, his efforts to stop Muharram ceremonies failed.
Provinces Round-up
According to the health ministry’s spokeswoman Dr. Sima Sadat Lari, currently 15 provinces remain in a red state of alert and 11 provinces are in an orange state:
- Red: Mazandaran, Tehran, Qom, Golestan, North Khorasan, Ardebil, Isfahan, Alborz, Razavi Khorasan, Kerman, Semnan, East Azerbaijan, Markazi, Yazd and Gilan
- Orange: Fars, Ilam, Lorestan, Hormozgan, Zanjan, Qazvin, West Azerbaijan, Bushehr, Hamedan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari and Kohgiluyeh and Boyer Ahmad
According to Dr. Lari, the average worldwide coronavirus death rate is 5.1 percent and on a downward trend but the death rate in Iran is 6.2 percent higher than the global average.
In her briefing for August 16, Dr. Lari also announced the official coronavirus statistics for the last 24 hours:
- New coronavirus cases: 2,133
- New hospitalizations: 1019
- Total cases since the outbreak: 343,203
- Total coronavirus tests conducted in Iran: 2,861,825
- Total recovered from coronavirus: 297,486
- New fatalities: 147
- Total death toll since the outbreak: 19,639
This is part of IranWire's coronavirus chronology. Read the full chronology
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