TEHRAN (AP) — The Iranian government has returned 820,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine donated by Poland because they were manufactured in the United States, Iranian state television said Monday.
The channel quoted Mohamad Hashemi, an official from Iran’s Health Ministry, as saying that the Polish government had donated nearly a million doses of the vaccine from British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca to the country.
“But when the vaccines arrived in Iran, we realized that 820,000 of those doses that were imported from Poland came from the United States,” he explained.
Hashemi said that “after coordination with the Polish ambassador to Iran, it was decided that the vaccines would be returned.”
Iran’s top religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word in all matters of state, ruled out any possibility of US or British vaccines reaching the country in 2020, classifying them as “prohibited.”
Currently, Iran only imports vaccines from the West that have not been made in the United States or Britain.
Hard-line congressmen dominated Parliament and railed against US-made vaccines, even as daily deaths in the country reached record numbers.
Iran is grappling with its sixth wave of coronavirus infections, with authorities saying the omicron variant is now predominant in the country.
With more than 135,000 total deaths from COVID-19, according to official figures, Iran has the highest number of deaths from this disease in a Middle Eastern country. Authorities say they have given two doses of the vaccine to about 90% of their population aged 18 and older, but only 37% of that group have received a third dose.
Iran’s vaccination program relies on the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, but it also offers its citizens a wide variety of other injections to choose from: Oxford’s AstraZeneca; Russia’s Sputnik V; Covaxin, from the Indian firm Bharat; and its own COVIran Barekat vaccine.
A large number of the vaccines applied in Iran have been from AstraZeneca.
–
