France 24
Iran bans imports of Covid-19 vaccines from the UK and the US, saying they are ‘completely untrustworthy’
Foreign companies will not be allowed to test Covid-19 vaccines on the Iranian people, said President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday, the day after the country’s supreme leader banned imports of jabs produced in the UK and the United States and said they they were “completely untrustworthy”. “Foreign companies wanted to give us vaccines to be tested on the Iranian people. But the health ministry avoided it,” said Rouhani in television comments, without naming the companies or giving more details. “Our people will not be a test device for vaccine manufacturers, “he added.” We must buy safe foreign vaccines. “The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top authority, said on Friday that the United States and Britain were” untrustworthy ” and possibly tried to spread Covid-19 to other countries. Khameini tweeted on Friday: “Importing vaccines made in the U.S. or the UK is prohibited,” Accompanied by the hashtag # CoronaVaccine.Twitter removed the tweet and posted a message saying that he had violated the platform’s rules against disinformation. movement of the supreme leader, World Health Organization emergency director Michael Ryan, emphasized that the global body has made repeated calls to “not politicize this virus.” Escalating tensions w With USIran, Iran reported more than 1.2 million cases of the new coronavirus, which caused more than 56,000 deaths. He accused the US archenemy of hampering access to vaccines through a severe sanctions regime. Although food and medicines are technically exempt from the measures, international banks tend to reject transactions involving Iran. Rouhani said last month that Washington demanded that Tehran pay for drugs through U.S. banks, adding that it feared that the United States to seize the money. The pandemic came after a few months of escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington, after U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a treaty on Iran’s nuclear program in 2015 and imposed stifling sanctions. In March last year, Khamenei rejected an offer from Trump to help with the pandemic, saying he did not trust the intentions of the United States, Iran’s “cruelest” enemy. Iran launched clinical trials of its own Covid- 19 developed within the Islamic Republic, the country in the Middle East most affected by the pandemic. The Iranian Red Crescent said on Friday that Iranian scientists based in the United States planned to send 150,000 doses of BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine to Iran, but that delivery had been canceled after Khamenei’s comments. “One million doses of the vaccine should have been delivered to the Red Crescent” through a third country, he said in a statement widely circulated in the local media. Khamenei said in a televised speech on Friday that “if Americans were able to produce” a reliable vaccine, “the coronavirus catastrophe would not have happened in their country.” Khamenei also tweeted that “given our experience with blood supplies infected with HIV in France, French vaccines are also unreliable “. This was a reference to a scandal in the 1980s when HIV-infected blood was distributed in France and later abroad, even after the government took note of the problem. Hundreds of people in Iran were among those infected. France’s then prime minister, Laurent Fabius, was charged with murder, but acquitted in 1999, while his health minister was convicted but never punished. FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS)