The Untold Story of How Iran Botched the Coronavirus Pandemic
Iran's leaders knew of the coming pandemic and took steps to protect themselves, but did nothing to protect their population. Now it is estimated than an Iranian dies once every 6 minutes.
Read the entire article at the link.The official statistics issued by Iran’s health ministry about the coronavirus pandemic, which report 23,049 people infected people and 1,812 deaths across the country as of March 23, are brutal enough. But there’s every reason to believe the real figures are much higher. Last Thursday, Kianush Jahanpur, an Iranian health ministry spokesman, tweeted that 50 people on average contract the virus in Iran almost every hour, and the fatality rate is one person every 10 minutes or six people per hour.
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Giving further credence to that theory is the fact that on Feb. 15, four days before Iran officially reported its first coronavirus cases, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had a customary meeting with a group of religious eulogists, but unlike in past years, his security detail did not permit them to approach Khamenei and kiss his hand. “They didn’t let us kiss aga’s hand,” the eulogist Nariman Panahi later clarified, using a local appellation to refer to the supreme leader. “Why? [Does this mean] aga ignored us? No. Protection of aga’s life is obligatory for us.”
Thus while the Iranian government cared for the life of the supreme leader and took extra precautions to protect him from the coronavirus as early as mid-February, it failed to care for the lives of 83 million Iranians and prioritized its partnership with China over the nation’s public health.
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Originally Posted by MMC
