Outdoor coronavirus victim in a hospital in Iran
By: Alejo Vidal-Quadras
The truth continues to undermine the official narrative of the Iranian regime’s coronavirus. Since Tehran began his efforts to paint a positive picture of his reaction to the pandemic, he has faced rejection from fitness professionals and citizens, whose testimonies have been largely collected and analyzed through the country’s main democratic opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen Organization. . (WIPO-MEK).
More recently, the gap between official narratives and original data is so great that even some government officials have struggled to uphold the law. While public statements from the Ministry of Health continue to estimate the death toll at less than 18,000, out of a total number of cases of approximately a quarter of a million, some members of the Ministry’s Coronavirus Response Working Group have made their own statements to independent agencies. media, which has raised doubts about these figures.
In early August, the BBC received an anonymous leak of information from the ministry and reported that some fitness officials estimated that the total number of cases was about double what was reported. In addition, on Sunday, the Iranian newspaper Jahan-e Sanat went much further, publishing an interview with former executing organization member Mohammadreza Mahboubfar in which he stated that “the figures announced through officials on instances and coronavirus deaths constitute only 5% of the countries. genuine tolls. »
Jahan-e Sanat interview with Mohammadreza Mahboubfar
The outreach led the government to temporarily shut down the newspaper, even though regime president Hassan Rohani had speculated in mid-July that more than 25 million Iranians could have swelled up with the new coronavirus. Iran’s total population is about 83 million and Rohani’s statements recognize that the de facto strategy of the regime opposed to coronaviruses is to adopt the concept of collective immunity, with all the deaths that this entails.
Tehran soon imposed a blockade of Iranian society when the epidemic reached an early peak. But it only kept the blockade in place on the Iranian New Year’s holiday, Nowruz. The economy began to reopen in mid-April, despite a new uptick in new cases. Even official estimates have presented a cascade of bad news since then, however, the government has never seriously strayed from the path of selling economic expansion at the expense of everything else, adding human life.
ThisArray after all, the strategy that the regime’s ideal leader, Ali Khamenei, defined in his Nowruz speech to the nation. As the highest authority on all political matters, Khamenei said the current Iranian calendar year “is the year of greatest production,” ensuring that Rohani and other officials remain committed to reopening no matter what.
The regime had laid the foundations for its strategy well in advance, in particular by disseminating incorrect information to eliminate public considerations about the virus. Like true infection rates and the number of deaths, this fact was long revealed long ago through various Iranian activists and through WIPO and has been shown through frustrated fitness officials in recent days.
When Iran’s lockdown began to be lifted, the outbreak had only been officially recognized for two months. In reality, it had been active for twice as long, through periods of widespread public activity. Naturally, this led to levels of transmission that made the brief, weakly-enforced lockdown completely ineffectual. Obviously, it is quite impossible that any major decision-makers were unaware of this fact, given that the regime had actively pushed for citizens to gather in shared spaces at times when only the government was aware of the threat to public health.
This was something that Mohammadreza Mahboubfar confirmed in the Sunday newspaper interview. “There was no transparent flow of information,” he said. “The government only provided engineered figures… over concerns about the election and the commemorations of the revolution anniversary.” Both of these events took place in February and both were viewed by regime authorities as crucial opportunities to counter the perception that their hold on power was weakening. These perceptions were well-founded, as Iran had been the site of a nationwide anti-government uprising in each of the previous two years.
The first of these, in January 2018, led the Supreme Leader to acknowledge that the Iranian Resistance movement posed a much more serious threat to the theocratic system than the regime had been willing to acknowledge before. The other, in November 2019, demonstrated the extent to which that regime was prepared to sacrifice human lives for its political aims. As protests erupted spontaneously in roughly 200 cities and towns, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with gunfire, killing an estimated 1,500 people.
Understanding that this crackdown would only fuel more public resentment over the long term, Tehran was desperate to project an image of strength and legitimacy. At the same time, the regime was eager to avoid the appearance of new social problems which might provide the people with additional reasons to condemn the current leadership. Simply acknowledging the coronavirus’ existence would have further weakened the mullahs’ hold on power, especially if it undermines carefully manufactured symbols of public support.
Fortunately, the turnout in February’s parliamentary elections reached a record low anyway. Unfortunately, that participation still constituted hundreds of thousands of individuals, with no measures in place to limit the spread of disease, but the greater threat to public health came from the anniversary of the revolution, earlier in the month. Even in absence of much genuine public support, the regime made every effort to bring people into the streets of major cities for the benefit of state television cameras. Attendance was mandatory for many government employees, while poor Iranians were given financial incentives to help pad the numbers.
Independent estimates of the infection rate and death toll have always been easy to explain in terms of the long-term outcome from these events. Official estimates seemed particularly absurd in light of the start date for the outbreak, which the MEK has long reported as being no later than the last week of January. This was corroborated by leaked documents from Iran’s National Emergency Organization, but now it appears that those documents did not include the earliest cases. According to Mahboubfar, Covid-19 was already present in Iran by December, sparking two solid months of outright denial from regime authorities.
Over the past several months, that denial has morphed into more carefully managed disinformation, but this has hardly made the regime’s strategy any less deadly. Even the regime’s official statistics show that August began with the greatest surge in new coronavirus cases in nearly a month and that daily death tolls are routinely in the triple digits, but these figures yet remain wildly out of step with reality. The latest reports from the MEK indicate that the overall death toll since the end of last year has now surpassed 85,500, and that its growth shows no sign of slowing down.
Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a professor of atomic and nuclear physics, was vice-president of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014. He is President of the International Committee In Search of Justice (ISJ)
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