Multiple health officials in Iran followed Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur’s lead in questioning the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party coronavirus figures on Monday, signaling that Iran’s failure to predict how many cases it would document was partially a result of China providing faulty information.
Jahanpur triggered outrage at the Chinese embassy in Tehran on Sunday by calling Chinese coronavirus data a “bitter joke.” The spokesman has previously criticized his own government for not doing enough to contain the virus and offered evidence that the official Iranian Islamic regime confirmed cases and death toll as a result of the coronavirus was not accurate.
Radio Farda, the Persian affiliate of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), found statements from two other senior health officials in the country — Head of the Iranian Center for HIV/AIDS Minoo Mohraz and Hamid Souri of Iran’s coronavirus task force — casting doubt on China’s official coronavirus statistics.
At press time, China claims to have documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and slightly over 3,000 deaths, nearly all of them in Hubei province, where the virus originated. Reports counting the number of sets of remains handed out by funeral homes in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, estimate that the real death toll in that city alone could surpass 45,000 people.
“Either the virus has mutated and become deadlier, or they were slacking in providing the data,” Mohraz, who was diagnosed with coronavirus this month, told Iranian media on Monday, referring to China, according to Radio Farda. “The disease has proved to be frighteningly more infectious and deadly than they reported.”
Mohraz added that Iran had learned not to “rely on their statistics. They provide the numbers and no one can go to China and report what they see [on the ground] directly.” Notably, Mohraz had blamed America for Iran’s initial failures in responding to the crisis, stating that American sanctions made it difficult for Iran to procure testing kits, which allowed asymptomatic people to spread the virus unknowingly for a longer time.
Souri, speaking to the Iranian IRNA government news agency the next day, blamed China’s “wrong data” for the toll the virus is taking on the Mideast country.
“Wrong data leads to wrong results and incorrect policies which in turn lead to in an increase in the number of victims,” Souri told IRNA.
Souri also accused Chinese government envoys of lying in the faces of their Iranian counterparts at a meeting to discuss the pandemic. “Lots of what was said did not add up,” he said of a meeting he attended with “prominent Chinese experts.”
Souri estimated on Tuesday that 500,000 people in Iran have coronavirus, an exponentially larger number than the official total.
While neither Iranian expert took as hard a line against the Chinese Communist Party as Jahanpur, they echoed his reservations about cooperating with Beijing.
“It seems statistics from China was a bitter joke because many in the world thought this is just like influenza, with fewer deaths. This [impression] were based on reports from China and now it seems China made a bitter joke with the rest of the world,” Jahanpur said on Sunday. “If in China they say an epidemic was controlled in two months, one should really think about it.”
China and Iran were, before the coronavirus pandemic, close allies. In January, China was Iran’s largest trading partner, while Iran remained one of China’s biggest oil providers, even with a precipitous drop in imports following another round of U.S. sanctions in 2019. China has consistently and loudly condemned Washington for policies meant to dissuade Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which its many powerful clerics have hinted would be used against American and Israeli targets. During the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, Iranian officials claimed the virus was an American or “Zionist” biological weapon, a claim that echoed Chinese propaganda accusing a U.S. Army base of developing the pathogen.
Iranian political officials, notably President Hassan Rouhani, have not turned away from blaming America for the epidemic in Iran.
“The US administration has not only violated international regulations by imposing illegal sanctions on Iran, but is also breaching health regulations ratified by the World Health Organization in 2005 through its measures under the current circumstances,” Rouhani told French President Emmanuel Macron during a phone call on Monday, according to Iran’s state-run PressTV.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry also appeared to attempt to repair the damage the health officials had done to Tehran’s relationship with Beijing.
“The government and people of China lead the way in suppressing coronavirus& generously aiding countries across the world,” a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, said on Twitter on Saturday, insisting Iran has “always been thankful to China in these trying times.” Notably, PressTV published the tweet as a news story on Monday, after Jahapur’s comments.
Like China, Iran is facing its own internal crisis of confidence as few in the country, including senior officials, believe the government’s data on coronavirus cases are inaccurate. Iran currently claims to have documented 62,589 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,872 deaths, a slightly higher death toll than China’s. Several estimates by dissidents abroad — most notably the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which uses sources in Iran’s hospitals and funeral homes — contend that the official numbers significantly undercount the cases. The NCRI’s latest estimate of the death toll is almost 20,000.
Iranian officials have questioned officials numbers, adding to concerns raised by political dissidents. Jahanpur himself told reporters in late March that one person in Iran was dying of coronavirus complications every ten minutes and the number of cases nationwide increased by 50 every hour — a number impossible to reconcile with official statistics. Local officials have also noted that Tehran’s nationwide totals are significantly small than the total if one adds up the respective statistics of each Iranian province.
Like many other countries, which have identified significant deficiencies in the way that China counts in coronavirus cases, Iranian officials now appear to be diverting the blame for its faulty data towards China.