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Iran’s ambassador to Russia previously said that the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines would consist of 10,000 doses.
Iran has received its first batch of foreign-made coronavirus vaccines, as the Middle East’s worst-hit country in terms of deaths seeks to stop the pandemic.
“The first shipment of vaccines from Moscow … has landed at the Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran,” state news agency IRNA reported on Thursday, without specifying the number of doses.
Iran’s ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali previously said that the first shipment would consist of 10,000 doses. Health workers and medically vulnerable groups will receive the first doses of the vaccines.
Iranian state television quoted Jalali as saying that Iran has ordered five million doses from Russia, with the next batches arriving on February 18 and 28.
According to the developers of Sputnik V, the vaccine is more than 90 percent effective and several countries outside of Russia have started administering it, including Argentina and Hungary.
The purchase of the Russian-made vaccine has sparked a debate in Iran, as one of the country’s leading infectious disease experts said he would not receive the vaccine because it had not yet been approved by the World Health Organization or the European Agency. of Medicines.
Minoo Mohraz, a key figure in the effort to produce local vaccines, said importing Sputnik V was “the bad luck of the Iranian people.”
The comments prompted a harsh reprimand from Kianoush Jahanpour, the spokesman for Iran’s Food and Drug Administration, who said Mohraz had no “responsibility or status” to comment on foreign COVID-19 vaccines.
An analysis of clinical trials in the leading medical journal The Lancet published this week indicated a 91.6 percent efficacy against symptomatic cases of COVID-19.
Iran is fighting the deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus in the Middle East, with at least 58,000 lives lost from more than 1.4 million cases of infection.
When announcing the latest number of victims on Thursday, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Sima Sadat Lari, warned that the situation in the country was “delicate and fragile”.
The seven-day average of confirmed daily infections in Iran was 6,567 on Wednesday, according to Our World in Data.
AstraZeneca vaccine
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei last month banned Iran from importing vaccines produced in the United States and the United Kingdom, claiming without proof that they were “completely untrustworthy.”
Iran’s Health Minister Saeed Namaki said Wednesday that Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca would provide the country with 4.2 million doses of its vaccine.
“AstraZeneca is produced in Russia, India and South Korea, and Iran uses these products against the coronavirus,” Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour told AFP news agency.
They were purchased through COVAX, the equitable vaccine distribution mechanism established by WHO.
Iranian-made vaccine
In December, Iran began testing an Iranian-made vaccine on humans and said it hopes to distribute it in the spring, an extremely aggressive schedule.
Before the recent accelerated development of coronavirus vaccines, routine methods of testing a vaccine for safety and efficacy with massive trials could take up to 10 years.
Iran has also started working on a joint vaccine with Cuba.
The Tehran government has touted Iran’s domestic vaccine research, repeatedly claiming that harsh sanctions from Washington undermine its efforts to buy foreign-made vaccines and launch mass inoculation campaigns like the ones underway in the US. USA and Europe.
While US sanctions have specific exceptions for medicine and humanitarian aid to Iran, international banks and financial institutions are hesitant to deal with Iranian transactions for fear of being fined or excluded from the US market.
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