Almost one million doses of COVID-19 vaccines donated from Poland have been returned by Iran after the nation discovered they were manufactured in the U.S., reports say.
An Iranian Health Ministry official shared in a state TV program on Monday that the nation had accepted a donation of about a million doses of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“But when the vaccines arrived in Iran, we found out that 820,000 doses of them which were imported from Poland were from the United States,” Mohammed Hashemi said.
Hashemi shared that they worked with the Polish ambassador to Iran and eventually decided “the vaccines would be returned.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, rejected any possibility of American or British vaccines entering the country in 2020, going as far as to call them “forbidden.” Khamenei has the final say on all state matters in Iran.
The Middle Eastern country has only imported and used Western vaccines not produced in the U.S. or Britain.
The rejection of the shipment of vaccines comes as Iran is fighting its sixth wave of COVID-19 infections, with omicron becoming the country’s leading strain. Iran currently sits with the highest death toll in the Middle East at 135,000 total deaths from the virus, the LA Times reported.
Iran has reported that 90% of its population older than 18 have been vaccinated with two shots, while only 37% of that group have had a third dose.
Iran has used several vaccines, including the state-backed Chinese vaccine Sinopharm, however, several are available to citizens, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca, Russia’s Sputnik V, and its own COVIran Barekat shot. The AstraZeneca shot accounts for a large number of the country’s inoculations.
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