kayhan.ir

News ID: 86419
Publish Date : 09 January 2021 - 21:50
President Rouhani:

Foreign Tests of Vaccines on Iranians Banned

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Foreign companies will not be allowed to test Covid-19 vaccines on the Iranian people, President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday, one day after Leader of the Islamic Revolution banned the import of UK- and U.S.-produced jabs and said they were "completely untrustworthy”.
"Foreign companies wanted to give us vaccines so they would be tested on the Iranian people. But the health ministry prevented it,” Rouhani said in televised remarks.
"Our people will not be a testing device for vaccine manufacturing companies,” he added. "We shall purchase safe foreign vaccines.”
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said on Friday the U.S. and Britain are "untrustworthy” and possibly seek to spread Covid-19 to other countries.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s edict bans imports of the BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 jabs.
Iran has reported more than 1.2 million cases of the novel coronavirus, which have caused over 56,000 deaths. The U.S. is hampering its access to vaccines and other medical equipment through a tough sanctions regime.
While food and medicine are technically exempt from the measures, international banks tend to reject transactions involving Iran.
Rouhani said last month that Washington had demanded that Tehran pay for the drugs through U.S. banks, adding that he had feared the United States would seize the money.
The Iranian Red Crescent said Friday that U.S.-based Iranian scientists had been planning to send 150,000 doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to Iran, but that the delivery had been cancelled following Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments.
"A million doses of the vaccine were meant to have been delivered to the Red Crescent” via a third country, it said in a statement.
Ayatollah Khamenei said in a televised address Friday that "if the Americans were able to produce” a trustworthy vaccine, "the coronavirus catastrophe wouldn’t have happened in their country”.
The Leader also said that "given our experience with France’s HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either”.
That was a reference to a scandal in the 1980s in which blood infected with HIV was distributed in France, and later abroad, even after the government became aware of the problem. Hundreds of people in Iran were among those infected.
France’s then prime minister Laurent Fabius was charged with manslaughter but acquitted in 1999, while his health minister was convicted but never punished.
Cuba said late on Friday it had signed an accord with Iran to transfer the technology for its most advanced coronavirus vaccine candidate and carry out last-stage clinical trials in humans of the shot in the Islamic Republic.
The allies are both under fierce U.S. sanctions that exempt medicine yet often put foreign pharmaceutical companies off trading with them and as such they seek to be self-reliant.  
Iran launched human trials of its first domestic COVID-19 vaccine


 candidate late last month, while Cuba has four candidates currently in trials although none yet in humans.
Once its most advanced candidate, Soberana (Sovereign) 2, has completed Phase II trials which started on Dec. 22, it will be tested in human trials in around 150,000 people in Havana, officials have said.
Yet the Caribbean country will need to conduct more human trials abroad too given it does not have a high infection rate due to its successful management of its outbreak, they said.  
Cuba’s Finlay Vaccine Institute said late on Friday it has signed an accord with Iran’s Pasteur Institute to collaborate on testing of Soberana 2.
"This synergy will enable both countries to advance more rapidly in the immunization against the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” it said on its Twitter account.
Cuba says several countries have expressed interest in its coronavirus vaccines but this is the first such accord it has reached.
Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur was cited by Iranian media as saying 50,000 volunteers would be recruited to carry out the Phase III clinical trials. Technology transfer and joint production were preconditions for allowing human testing in the country, he said.
Iran Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif said he was "impressed” by the biotech achievements of its old ally Cuba in the fight against COVID-19 during a visit to Havana on a Latin American tour last November.
In addition to developing its own vaccine, Iran is participating in the COVAX scheme which aims to secure fair access to COVID-19 vaccines for world countries.  
Cuba has not talked of importing vaccines from elsewhere and said it intends to start vaccinating its population against COVID-19 with its own vaccine in the first half of the year.