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THE MOST DANGEROUS THING ABOUT CORONAVIRUS IS THE HYSTERIA

The most dangerous thing about coronavirus is the hysteria
It is the latest phenomenon to fulfil our weird and growing appetite for doom
By Ross Clark
The Spectator
February 29, 2020

https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/The-most-dangerous-thing-about-coronavirus-is-the-hysteria

If you have just cancelled your trip to Venice and ordered your £19.99 surgical face mask from Amazon, how about this for a terrifying vision: by the time we get to April, 50,000 Britons will have succumbed to a combination of infectious disease and adverse weather. Frightened? If you are, don’t worry: you survived. It was two years ago. In 2017-18 the (British) Office for National Statistics recorded 50,100 ‘excess winter deaths’. The explanation, according to the ONS, was probably ‘the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, and below average winter temperatures’.

Coronavirus (Covid-19) is a pretty virulent virus all right, but not in the way you might imagine. It is less our respiratory tracts it has infected than our inner sense of angst. By last Monday there were 79,331 confirmed cases worldwide, all but 2,069 of which were in China. There have been 2,595 deaths in China and 23 elsewhere in the world. And seasonal flu? According to an estimate by the US-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention, it has caused between 291,000 and 646,000 deaths globally a year. To put it another way, if the number of deaths from coronavirus rises a hundredfold in the next few weeks or months, it will only have reached the lower bound of the estimate for existing strains of flu.

How many of us wear face masks because of winter flu? How many planes and trains are cancelled? Does the stock market slump? There is some justification for being more wary of Covid-19 than the flu. The former is an unknown quantity and we don’t yet have a vaccine. But we know more about it by the day. Its death rate is now around 1 per cent or less and it is mostly killing people with pre-existing health conditions; anyone else would be unlucky to die from it.

Coronavirus hysteria occurs because we confuse precaution with risk. We see Chinese cities being cut off, people being quarantined, factories closed, the streets emptying (save for a few people in face masks) and we interpret this as a sign of grave and imminent danger. If China had not taken such dramatic steps to stop the disease, we wouldn’t be half as worried.

There seems to be a distinct strain of Sino-phobia in our attitude towards infectious disease. Every novel disease that comes out of China instantly seems to gain the description ‘pandemic’ – even when diseases such as Sars and H5N1 avian flu hardly justify being called an ‘epidemic’. Covid-19 seems to fit neatly with our fears about Huawei spying on our phones and Chinese manufacturers stealing our jobs. Diseases from elsewhere don’t excite the imagination nearly so much. There was a brief flurry of concern in 2014 when Ebola, vastly more lethal than Covid-19, emerged in West Africa (it has since killed 11,310 people globally). But if we are going to worry about any infectious disease, it ought to be tuberculosis. The World Health Organization reports there were ten million new cases worldwide in 2018, 1.45 million deaths, and 4,672 cases in England. But no one ever bought a face mask because of that. How many people even know that the epicentre of tuberculosis is India, with 27 per cent of cases globally?

There is something more to the Covid-19 panic. It is the latest phenomenon to fulfil a weird and growing appetite for doom among the populations of developed countries. We are living in the healthiest, most peaceful time in history, yet we cannot seem to accept it. We constantly have to invent bogeymen, from climate alarmism, nuclear war and financial collapse to deadly diseases. Covid-19 has achieved such traction because it has emerged at just the right time. At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed without incident. The standoff between the US and Iran – which preposterously led the ‘Doomsday Clock’ to be advanced closer to midnight than during the Cuban missile crisis – fizzled into nothing. The Australian bush fires, which caused an explosion in climate doom-mongering (even though the global incidence of wildfires has fallen over the past two decades) had largely gone out. What more was there to worry about?

Then along came a novel strain of disease and the cycle of panic began again. But there are already strong signs that it has peaked. In the seven days before 24 February, the WHO recorded 6,398 new infections in China – down from 13,002 the previous week. On Monday it was 415. Very soon we are going to have to find another thing to agonise about. Asteroids? The next ‘freak’ weather incident, now the storms have died down? Who knows, but we will certainly find something.

 

CORONAVIRUS COULD BREAK IRANIAN SOCIETY

Coronavirus Could Break Iranian Society
The government has refused to impose quarantines and is encouraging people to visit the city of Qom, the center of the outbreak.
By Graeme Wood
The Atlantic
February 27, 2020

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/iran-cannot-handle-coronavirus/607150

Picture the following sacred but unhygienic scene: Pilgrims from a dozen countries converge on one small city. They stay in cramped hotels, using communal toilets and eating meals together. For their main ritual, they converge on the tomb of a woman, the sister of a holy man, and as they get closer, they feel with rising intensity grief over her death and the deaths of her kin. The grief is a commandment: Each tear, according to one tradition, will be transformed in the afterlife into a pearl, and an angel will compensate them for their tears with a bucket of pearls that will be signs of their devotion when they arrive at the gate of paradise. But for now the bodily fluids are flowing, wiped away occasionally by bare hands, and the crowd is getting denser. A metal cage surrounds the tomb itself, and when the weeping pilgrims reach it, they interlace their fingers with its bars, and many press their face against it, fogging up the shiny metal with their breath. Some linger for minutes, some for seconds. In a single day, many thousands pass through the same cramped space – breathing the same air, touching the same surfaces, trading new and exotic diseases.

The city is Qom, Iran, and two days ago, a local health official declared on Iranian television that the coronavirus was burning through the community. The situation, he said, is grim. Iran claims that, countrywide, 26 people have died from the coronavirus illness (known as COVID-19), out of 245 total infections. All acknowledge that Qom is the center of infection, but many doubt that the numbers are accurate. Another official, a member of Iran’s Parliament from Qom, said last weekend that his city had already lost 50 people to COVID-19. That figure, assuming it’s accurate, suggests that if COVID-19 is as deadly in Iran as it is elsewhere and kills 2.3 percent of its victims, another 2,000 people have the disease in Qom alone.

It is difficult to overstate what a disaster these numbers express – not just for Iran, but for everyone. Qom is a seat of Shiite learning, the spiritual omphalos of Iran, and as a result, it draws the pious from all over the Shiite world. I profiled a Lebanese cleric in Paraguay for The Atlantic in 2009; his previous address had been in a seminary in Qom. On the streets of Qom, you hear Persian spoken in many accents, including Tajik and Afghan. In some restaurants, servers will address you in Arabic, and posters of Muhammad al-Sadr, a revered Iraqi ayatollah, look down at you as eat your kebab. Qom feels like a Shiite Disneyland, filled with religious attractions (with junk food for sale between stations), and that comparison might be the best way for Americans to understand the gravity of this outbreak. What if we found out that thousands of people at Disney World all had a highly contagious, sometimes fatal illness – and that vacationers had been coming and going, returning to their home city, for weeks?

Zeynep Tufekci has written about the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism in dealing with a disaster like this. China can lock down a city, quarantining tens of millions at a time, and it can marshal its top experts, allowing them to wage a campaign against the disease with the absolute authority of a caesar. But it can’t avail itself of the benefits of public trust, including transparent and honest accounts of the disease and its toll. In Iran, it appears that the government has all the disadvantages of an unfree society, and none of the compensating advantages. Watch this incredible video, at once comic and horrifying, of a top Iranian health official, Iraj Harirchi, assuring the public that the situation is being addressed, while sweating and coughing on colleagues and his audience because he has contracted the coronavirus:

https://youtu.be/fctowSC1tbI

Nor is he the only top official to have been infected: Today, Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran’s vice president and a notoriously cruel member of the group of Iranians who held U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979, announced that she, too, has the disease. According to reports, she met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his cabinet just yesterday, potentially exposing the entire senior leadership of Iran to the disease.

Harirchi stated that the government refuses to impose quarantines, because they are premodern and ineffective. Mohammad Saeedi, the head of the shrine in Qom and a local representative of the country’s supreme leader, not only opposes a quarantine but begged people to visit the shrine, calling it a “place of healing.”

At some point, incompetence and evil become indistinguishable. I feel like we have passed this point several times in the past few years, and Iran’s leadership in particular keeps passing it over and over, like a Formula 1 car doing laps. Last month’s accidental downing of a civilian airliner exposed one form of fatal incompetence, followed by an abortive effort to cover it up. Iranians are understandably primed to wonder whether this disaster is similar, a tragedy of malign incompetence that is expanding beyond the government’s ability to contain.

The quarantine measures that Iran has rejected are imperfect, and they would stigmatize Qom unfairly. But the current situation of what appears to be virtually uncontrolled pathogen spread is accelerating the epidemic, and right now the most valuable commodity is time – time to stockpile medicine, improve diagnosis and treatment, and teach the world how to react to a plague that may kill millions. The quarantine in China seems to be buying us time. The lack of one in Iran is spending it away.

Quarantine is from the Italian word for 40, because during outbreaks of the Black Death, ships entering Venice had to wait 40 days before sailors and goods could come ashore. (The Black Death, curiously enough, seems to have found its first footing in none other than the Hubei province of China, also the epicenter of COVID-19. It killed roughly a third of the population of Europe.) Forty days is a long time, longer than any of the quarantines currently being imposed on individuals traveling from outbreak sites.

But any amount of waiting can be stressful, even in a place much more competently run than Iran. Earlier this month, I visited Hong Kong. Everyone wore masks. In public, no one crowded into my personal space on buses or in narrow pedestrian alleys. Shopkeepers came outside every quarter hour or so to wipe down the doorknobs and door buzzers of their shops, in case the last customer had left a viral particle. The burden of containing the coronavirus felt collective, and heavy. Hong Kong has a strong sense of identity and group responsibility, which has up until now kept it sane. I could take just a few days of it. Only in the middle of the night, when I knew I would encounter no one up close, did I feel comfortable – and not like some kind of norm-violating monster – walking around with my face exposed to the air.

Iranians are under immense stress already, from economic, political, and military pressure. They do not trust their government. The daily stress of worrying, literally every few minutes, whether you will accidentally kill yourself by picking your nose or opening a door may prove, additively, too much for a society to bear. Urging visits to Qom, I fear, is the reaction of a government that has at last recognized its own limitations and has, at some level, embraced the virus. These crazy reactions greatly increase the chances that you will soon embrace it too.

 

THE MIDDLE EAST’S FUTURE OF PERPETUAL PANDEMICS

The Middle East’s Future of Perpetual Pandemics

If outbreaks like the coronavirus shift from ‘black swan’ events to regular occurrences, globalization trends in the region may reverse, with sobering consequences.

By Michael Knights
Politico
February 26, 2020

As the coronavirus outbreak has spread internationally, the world’s attention has focused on China, the country where it originated. But as a Middle East watcher for the past two decades, I really got interested when it popped up in Iran, a Chinese trading partner and an equally authoritarian and deceptive regime. Financial markets and political leaders are fixated on the virus’ arrival in Europe and the United States, but what is happening in Iran, the geographic keystone that connects Asia, Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, should be just as worrying.

The challenges of combating the spread of the virus in a country that is not known for its transparency became obvious on Monday when Iran’s deputy health minister showed signs of infection at his own press conference. Just hours earlier, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani had characterized the outbreak as “a conspiracy by the enemies” of Iran. Even after acknowledging later that he had tested positive for the virus, the health minister minimized the extent of the emergency, insisting that a widely publicized death toll of 50 people in the city of Qom was inflated and that there was no need for a quarantine.

Undervaluing the impact of pandemics is not limited to Iranian government officials. It’s actually a widespread phenomenon among Middle East experts who tend to focus more on war and terrorism risks when doing their forecasts. But the spread of coronavirus to the seat of many of the world’s oldest and greatest civilizations is a dramatic development with long-term consequences for the region and the world. Pandemics will soon be both commonplace and a key driver of the future of society.

One idea emerging from future-gazers – and I pay attention to novelists as well as economists, sociologists and technologists – is the idea that pandemics will roll back aspects of globalization or even bring it to a screeching halt. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, a novel set in a futuristic Thailand, today’s globalization is a past period remembered as “the expansion.” In the face of pandemics and resource wars, global trade has collapsed into a new reality known as “the contraction.”

These concepts are already beginning to show themselves in the Middle East, which is why I have increasingly placed pandemics at the center of my forecasts for the region. In addition to being tightly connected to so many places, at the literal center of global aviation, energy and shipping hubs, the Middle East is weakened by wars, corruption, failing health services and deceptive regimes that may try to cover up the extent of future pandemics, as the Iranian government is trying to do today.

Displaced person camps (such as the 80,000-person Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan) are particularly vulnerable. Refugees and other migrants flowing undetected to Europe are further risk factors for the spread of pandemics via the Middle East.

The civil wars and refugee crises of the present day give us some insights into how pandemics could shape the future world. In my work, I have seen how terrorism, refugees and resource constraints combine to test the cohesion of societies.

The scourges of al-Qaida – and later the Islamic State – brought out mixed reactions in the populations of weak states like Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Sometimes more stable areas tried to cut themselves off, restrict freedom of movement to countrymen of different sects, or even hoard their ample resources (such as electricity) from dysfunctional parts of civil war states.

More often, I was shocked by how open and welcoming the “haves” were to the “have-nots” from less fortunate communities “infected” by war. Tight social connections, a generally merciful outlook and loosely controlled societies will unfortunately be wide open to future pandemics like the coronavirus.

A common ode to globalization is that we live in a world that is getting smaller all the time, meaning that travel and the ordering of goods are easier, faster and cheaper. But what if the future is more like Bacigalupi’s “contraction”?

Thinking about my own area of focus, the Middle East region, I can imagine that some things might not be affected. Commodities will continue to flow as long as hydrocarbons are needed, because it is possible to run an oil and gas sector with a minimal number of well-protected people, and energy exports pose almost no risk of infection.

In contrast, the movement of people would be entirely changed, with profound societal and economic impacts on some parts of the region. Imagine the constriction of pilgrim flows to Mecca, the exodus of expatriate technocrats from Dubai, or the end of imported Asian guest workers in the Gulf.

Many societies are built on travel, including many Western states. (When trapped in the United Kingdom due to ash clouds from the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, I had the time and inclination to imagine how a U.K. under a permanent no-fly zone might evolve.)

Under a contraction scenario, when people wanted to work in a country, they might have to commit to stay there for a very long time, if not forever. In the near-future movie “Code 46,” all cross-border movement is a complex bureaucratic endeavor, carrying the risk of permanent exclusion. States – including the exclusive Gulf monarchies – might have to reconsider their citizenship rules to incentivize targeted immigration.

One upside for Middle Easterners, after a harsh period of adjustment, might be the localization of their economies. This development may be coming in any case, with the maturation of 3D printing, additive manufacturing and nanotechnology making it less necessary to ship items from long distances away. Pandemic-driven contraction could accelerate this trend. For countries bypassed by the 19th-century industrial revolution, including most of the Middle East, there could be a new driver away from import dependence and toward job creation.

The globalized spread of ideas and culture might not be directly affected by pandemic-driven contraction, but there might nonetheless be an upsurge in the nationalism, nativism and protectionism that is already rearing its head in reaction to the economics and social diversification effects of globalization. Many Middle Easterners might be quite happy to see a tempering of the imposition of what Henry Kissinger aide David Young once called “the peril of the dominant culture” – the risk that globalization might make everywhere the same, wiping away the differences that delight and surprise.

In a pandemic-ridden future, nation states might become stronger, because they clearly define who can come and who must go based on nationality, and because they have potentially well-policed borders. But states will gain in legitimacy only if they prove effective when tested by pandemics and other threats.

Inefficient states with long land borders and poor public health systems – such as Russia, Iran and perhaps China – may prove the most susceptible in the new ecosystem of regularly recurring pandemics. In those kinds of vulnerable states, a breakdown into smaller, more cohesive, perhaps more authoritarian subsystems might be the natural effect of pandemic-driven contraction.

Where today the world is getting smaller, there is a good case for thinking through how we (collectively and individually) would cope with living in a bigger world again, where everywhere is further apart and where local actors become the uncontested masters of their fate once more. As pandemics become a dominant feature of the global system, the short-lived “expansion” may risk coming to an end. Some more isolationist voices in America might see pandemics as yet another reason to view the world as a dangerous place that should be avoided at all costs. On the other hand, if the United States still stands for a global order and global markets, then it needs to lead a collective defense against the threat of pandemic, the coming global earthquake of which the coronavirus may merely be an early and gentle tremor.

 

IRAN BATTLES CORONAVIRUS – AND THE BLACK MARKET FOR MEDICAL SUPPLIES

Iran Battles Coronavirus – and the Black Market for Medical Supplies
As Iran struggles to contain the virus, security forces are targeting people hoarding masks for sale on the black market
By Aresu Eqbali and Sune Engel Rasmussen
Wall Street Journal (news)
March 1, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-battles-coronavirusand-the-black-market-for-medical-supplies-11583081174

TEHRAN – Iranian authorities have seized millions of medical supplies being hoarded by black-market traders, an effort to alleviate their own shortfall as they battle to contain the world’s second-deadliest national coronavirus outbreak.

The death toll from the epidemic in Iran rose to 54 people Sunday, the health ministry said, up from 43 the previous day. The number of confirmed cases rose 65% from the day before to 978.

The country is suffering from a shortage of critical medical supplies, caused partly by an import ban on a variety of products aimed at boosting Iran’s domestic industry in the face of U.S. sanctions. The import ban on protective masks was lifted last week, and an import tariff of 55% was lowered to 5%.

As the epidemic has spread, traders and smugglers have stocked up on supplies in order to sell them at inflated prices, government officials say. Some consumers and health clinics have been forced to buy them from the black market.

In the past week, Iranian police have responded by confiscating more than 27 million hygienic items, including 6.7 million masks – about four days’ worth of domestic production – from hoarders, arresting at least 70 people. In the past 48 hours, they have confiscated more than 10 million gloves, 10 tons of disinfectant and 9,000 gallons of dialysis machine acid, said the police chief for economic crimes, Mohammadreza Moghimi.

Authorities have also temporarily closed down dozens of pharmacies for hoarding and overcharging for masks.

The push has implicated Iran’s biggest online retailer.

In a news broadcast, state television reporters followed agents from the country’s judiciary into a warehouse belonging to Digikala, where they found a stock of what the company said was 34,000 protective masks, despite not having a license to sell them. Digikala in a statement denied breaking any regulations.

Iranian Health Minister Saeed Namaki in a letter to President Hassan Rouhani said once the coronavirus took hold in China, he ordered the customs bureau to ban exports of masks and assigned colleagues to stock up on them in case they were needed for an outbreak in Iran.

“Unfortunately, a small amount was purchased and the rest of the products went to the black market,” Mr. Namaki wrote in the letter published Saturday by the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

Faced with a public-health crisis, Iranian authorities have ordered hospitals to focus on coronavirus patients and other emergency cases. They have canceled public events such as Friday prayers.

“If people follow the instructions, avoid hanging out and socializing, traffic and stop traveling, we will see the outcome in the next three, five days or next week,” health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said on state television.

Experts have questioned the official Iranian statistics and suggested that the actual number of cases may be in the tens of thousands, based on the number of deaths and cases abroad originating from Iran.

Experts say the official number might reflect insufficient surveillance and a lack of ability to detect the virus. Some Iranians have said they are reluctant to get tested out of fear of contracting the virus in hospitals. Iranian authorities have denied misleading the public about the epidemic.

The sharp increase in cases on Sunday shows the results of stepped-up surveillance and more willingness among Iranians to be tested, the health ministry said.

The coronavirus has spread from Iran, primarily via travelers who visited the holy pilgrimage city of Qom, to at least 12 other countries, including Armenia, which on Sunday reported its first case.

Mr. Rouhani in a phone call Saturday with Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “We are moving toward complete control of the situation.”

But the head of Tehran’s coronavirus management operations, Alireza Zali, said, “We will definitely be dealing with this virus for a considerable period.”

Iran’s deputy health minister for treatment, Qassem Janbabaei, said that in the best-case scenario, Iran would be dealing with the virus until the Iranian New Year on March 19, but possibly until late June, according to the Young Journalists Club state news agency.

 

HOW IRAN’S REGIME SPREAD CORONAVIRUS TO THE MIDDLE EAST

How Iran’s Regime Spread Coronavirus to the Middle East
By Seth Frantzman
The Jerusalem Post
February 25, 2020

On Monday, Iranian official Ahmad Amirabadi said there have been up to 50 deaths in Iran from coronavirus. The regime did what it knows how to do best: It sought to silence him and condemn him for spreading the news, claiming that only 12 had died from the virus and that there were only 61 cases in the country.

However, for five days Iran has known that there were likely more cases concentrated in the holy city of Qom, where religious pilgrims gather.

Iranians have been largely left in the dark since last Wednesday, when two deaths were announced in the Islamic Republic from coronavirus. The regime wanted elections to go well on February 21, so it sought to prevent any news of the virus for days.

By Saturday it was too late, and the country moved to shut down schools and universities. But Iranians and other pilgrims who came to Qom and became sick with the virus were already on the move.

They flew back to Iraq’s Najaf and via Dubai to Bahrain, as well as arriving in Kuwait and Oman. Iran did not inform its neighbors until it was too late. Last Friday, Turkish government officials were already warning that there might be 750 cases in Iran.

Iranian Deputy Health Minister Iraj Hairichi and MP Mahmoud Sadeghi now say they are sick with the virus, and officials admit that many more are sick. New cases in Oman and Bahrain were announced Tuesday – all linked to Iran.

Iran has now set the Middle East ablaze with fears of coronavirus. The virus was mostly limited to China until two weeks ago. Then it moved rapidly to Italy and South Korea, where there are thought to be hundreds and 1,000 cases, respectively. But the regime in Tehran purposely hid the numbers of sick.

It may have done so partially out of incompetence, with a Health Ministry that did not know how to find, quarantine or test the sick. In fact, Iran has not done what China or Italy or other places have done. It has not been transparent and did not even quarantine the cases in Qom or elsewhere. Instead, Iran has acted like an incubator.

IRAN HAS ACTED LIKE AN INCUBATOR FOR CORONAVIRUS

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke with an Austrian delegation on Sunday. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif smiled and laughed with the Austrians. The virus was a big joke for the president and minister. Zarif later joked that he did not have the virus. Rouhani claimed the virus was like US sanctions: It seemed worse than it was.

Not far from where the men were laughing, Mojtaba Rahmanzadeh, mayor of district 13 in Tehran, was sick and hospitalized for coronavirus. He had been diagnosed on Saturday. But the Iranian regime was not pressed by the Austrians to discuss the issue.

After Iran closed schools and a university on Sunday and Monday, people began to demand answers and protective masks. By Tuesday, three more had died, bringing the toll to 15, the second highest outside China. Iran’s police were hunting for medical masks.

Fears of price gouging were rampant. The police claimed on Tuesday that they had found millions of masks hidden in warehouses. The virus appears to be a national emergency, because Ali Shamkhani of the Supreme National Security Council has attacked Amirabadi for spreading news of the 50 deaths.

Iran’s neighbors are fed up with the regime’s lack of transparency. They have closed their borders or instituted drastic checks. People who traveled to Iran and arrived in Najaf in Iraq, Bahrain and Oman are now sick. There are eight cases in Kuwait and six in Bahrain.

The UAE this week stopped dozens of flights to Iranian cities. Oman has stopped imports from Iran. Kuwait has closed borders and ports. Afghanistan has shut its border but is concerned over the thousands who cross illegally. Bahrain is stopping flights from the UAE.

Iran’s export of the virus has caused massive concern in Iraq. In Najaf there are now 20 people under observation for the virus. And Iraq is not well prepared. Medical masks are out of date, ministry phone numbers don’t work, and the country is struggling to stop travel to Najaf and suspend travel to Iran.

Iran and Iraq are closely linked in religious issues, weapons trafficking and trade. Cutting off these contacts is a major move. It comes at a bad time for Baghdad, after months of protests and with a new prime minister who lacks a government. In the Kurdistan region there are long lines at gas stations as people fear borders will close.

ROUHANI SAYS DIVINE HELP WILL OVERCOME THE VIRUS

Iran’s government is in denial. Rouhani has claimed that the virus is no worse than the flu in the US that kills thousands of people a year. He claims the country, with divine help, will overcome the virus.

“The coronavirus is an uninvited traveler and goes to any country, but we have to overcome this problem,” he said Tuesday.

The truth is that Rouhani’s government has made the situation worse by covering up the extent of the virus and also by not providing transparent answers to the international community or Iran’s neighbors. The regime has gotten used to this over the last few months, after downing a Ukrainian airliner and killing 1,500 protesters. The deaths from the virus do not matter to the regime, as Rouhani indicates: If thousands die or even tens of thousands, it will be like any other flu virus, and the country will move on.

For average Iranians, becoming collateral damage to the country trying to preserve its reputation may not be what they bargained for. For Iraq, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon and other countries now under threat because of people who traveled to Iran, the government’s indecision – and its not treating the issue as an emergency – could also be bad news.

IRAN’S REGIME HAS A SIEGE MENTALITY THAT BLAMES FOREIGNERS FOR ITS PROBLEMS

It is already causing panic in the Gulf and Iraq. Health ministries from Erbil in the Kurdistan region to Abu Dhabi are trying to reassure people not to panic or spread rumors. Tehran’s unwillingness to take part in a regional response to the crisis is not helping tamp down the rumors.

Iran’s regime has a siege mentality that is used to blaming foreigners for its problems. It blames foreign media for reporting on the virus. Even Iran’s authoritarian contacts in other countries will have warned it to take no chances with this virus. China knows what the results can be, as do Gulf states.

But Iran did not listen. It kept its Mahan Air and other carriers flying. Pilgrims kept coming because the theocracy, which is the regime, judged faith to be more important than science. Pharmacies are now out of masks in Iran. People are confused and worried – and so is the entire Middle East.

 

CORONAVIRUS AND THE TRAGEDY OF IRAN

Coronavirus and the Tragedy of Iran
The Islamic Republic has missed out on global prosperity and is now in its decadent, late-Soviet stage.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Wall Street Journal (opinion)
March 2, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-tragedy-of-iran-11583101054

Nowhere other than in China is the coronavirus epidemic more severe than in Iran, where authorities confirmed Sunday that at least 54 people, including an 81-year-old former ambassador, have died from Covid-19. The real death toll may be considerably higher than that; on Friday, BBC Persian tallied 210 deaths from individual hospitals. Seven prominent officials have contracted the disease, including Vice President Masoumeh Ebtekar, who in her youth served as a spokesman for U.S. Embassy hostage-takers. Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi broke out in a sweat Feb. 24 as he assured the public that the epidemic was under control; the following day he announced he was sick.

President Hassan Rouhani has lamely insisted the epidemic is “one of the enemy’s plots.” His government, meanwhile, has inspired unprecedented apathy. Turnout in February’s parliamentary elections was the lowest in the Islamic republic’s history: 43% nationally and 25% in Tehran.

These are symptoms of a broader malaise. The world-wide material and human progress of the past few decades has largely left Iran behind, despite conditions that should encourage success. It sits at the crossroads of Eurasia and has a highly educated population of 85 million. Perhaps the greatest cultural, economic and geopolitical tragedy of our time is the near-absence of the Iranian nation in a world perfectly suited for its human potential.

History often moves on a hinge, and there were many hinges in the late 1970s. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi suffered from lymphatic cancer: that, and his prednisone regimen, adversely affected his judgment and decisiveness. President Jimmy Carter was prone to vacillating and misread the intentions of the Iranian clerical movement. Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein expelled the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from the Shiite holy city of Najaf, forcing Khomeini into exile in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château. There he sat cross-legged beneath an apple tree, rallied his followers, and methodically seduced the world media.

If these hinges had not worked together as they did, Iran today might look like South Korea – a vibrant, pulsing economic engine at the forefront of globalization. The Pahlavis might have gradually been reduced from absolute rulers to constitutional monarchs. Instead, Iran went backward politically, while barely crawling forward economically.

In 1977 Iran’s economy was 26% larger than Turkey’s, 65% larger than South Korea’s, and almost 5.5 times the size of Vietnam’s – all countries with somewhat larger populations. In 2017 on the eve of the Trump administration’s sanctions, Turkey’s economy was nearly 2.5 times the size of Iran’s, South Korea’s more than seven times, and Vietnam’s had gone from less than 20% to 70%, according to Nadereh Chamlou, a former World Bank official. While poverty has declined in Iran, 40% of the population earns less than $10 a day, which the bank classifies as “near poverty.”

What went wrong? “Domestic policies to promote entrepreneurship could have helped to capitalize on Iran’s young and educated population,” Ms. Chamlou concludes. “A foreign policy geared to regional and global integration could have permitted Iran to benefit much more from its unique economic geography.”

Imagine the geopolitical clout a stable Iranian constitutional monarchy would have today. Iran would enjoy strategic cooperation with Israel and stable, nonconfrontational relations with Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab world. Iran is economically, culturally and demographically suited to be at the crossroads of Central Asia: Only its relative backwardness and extreme religiosity prevent the secular, vodka-drinking leaders of former Soviet republics from being more attracted to it.

Instead, Iran is a pauperized and lonely nation. Its only allies in the Greater Middle East are the murderous proxy militias it supports and Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not Iran, now have de facto security relationships with Israel, though the Persians have had better relations with the Jews for millennia.

At the same time, the clerical regime has worked to obscure the memory of historic Persia, which preceded Islam by more than a thousand years, reducing a rich civilization to a bleak lumpen proletariat. Theocracy has promoted cynicism about religion. Mosque attendance has been down for years. As the French political scientist Olivier Roy puts it, “the political victory of Islamism is the end of true devotion.” Instead, crowds gather in Shiraz at the tomb of Hafez, the 14th-century poet of wine and romance. Many an Iranian bookshelf holds a volume of his sensuous verse, a quiet symbol of defiance against the Islamic authorities.

In the Islamic Revolution, one bureaucratic power structure – that of the shah – quickly gave way to another, that of the clerics. In this and other ways, the Islamic Revolution was far more sophisticated than the formless, leaderless uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. But Iran is in the decadent phase of its revolution. Like the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, the regime seems stable yet is widely seen as illegitimate by the population, and thus is in danger of unraveling – perhaps with disastrous aftershocks.

The Soviet collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev led to social and economic upheaval, with violent ethnic conflicts on the Russian imperial periphery and the eventual re-establishment of dictatorship under Vladimir Putin. Iran, like late-Soviet Russia, has a deeply corroded political culture. Prompt establishment of constitutional order may be too much to hope for.

A regime collapse could give way to even more tyrannical rule by the Revolutionary Guards, and to uprisings in the Kurdish, Azeri, Turkman and Baluchi peripheries. Apart from the Revolutionary Guards, there would be no pre-existing bureaucratic power structure to replace the clerical one. Civil society has been decimated for decades. It’s not clear if any faction would have complete control of Iran’s formidable missile arsenal, which may extend to sites in Iraq and Syria.

The Trump administration is trying to bring Iran to its knees, but it needs to focus on what will come afterward. With a declining economy, a raging coronavirus epidemic, and an aged and ailing supreme leader, Iran in the coming years promises to be more interesting – and more dangerous – than at any time in recent memory.

 

ISRAELI SCIENTISTS: ‘IN A FEW WEEKS, WE WILL HAVE CORONAVIRUS VACCINE’

Israeli scientists: ‘In a few weeks, we will have coronavirus vaccine’

Once the vaccine is developed, it will take at least 90 days to complete the regulatory process and potentially more to enter the marketplace.

By Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman
Jerusalem Post
February 28, 2020

https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-scientists-In-three-weeks-we-will-have-coronavirus-vaccine-619101

Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus, according to Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis. If all goes as planned, the vaccine could be ready within a few weeks and available in 90 days, according to a release.

“Congratulations to MIGAL [The Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough,” Akunis said. “I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

For the past four years, a team of MIGAL scientists has been developing a vaccine against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which causes a bronchial disease affecting poultry. The effectiveness of the vaccine has been proven in preclinical trials carried out at the Veterinary Institute.

“Our basic concept was to develop the technology and not specifically a vaccine for this kind or that kind of virus,” said Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader. “The scientific framework for the vaccine is based on a new protein expression vector, which forms and secretes a chimeric soluble protein that delivers the viral antigen into mucosal tissues by self-activated endocytosis, causing the body to form antibodies against the virus.

Endocytosis is a cellular process in which substances are brought into a cell by surrounding the material with cell membrane, forming a vesicle containing the ingested material.In preclinical trials, the team demonstrated that the oral vaccination induces high levels of specific anti-IBV antibodies, Katz said.

“Let’s call it pure luck,” he said. “We decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system just as a proof of concept for our technology.”

But after scientists sequenced the DNA of the novel coronavirus causing the current worldwide outbreak, the MIGAL researchers examined it and found that the poultry coronavirus has high genetic similarity to the human one, and that it uses the same infection mechanism, which increases the likelihood of achieving an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time, Katz said.

“All we need to do is adjust the system to the new sequence,” he said. “We are in the middle of this process, and hopefully in a few weeks we will have the vaccine in our hands. Yes, in a few weeks, if it all works, we would have a vaccine to prevent coronavirus.”

MIGAL would be responsible for developing the new vaccine, but it would then have to go through a regulatory process, including clinical trials and large-scale production, Katz said.

Akunis said he has instructed his ministry’s director-general to fast-track all approval processes with the goal of bringing the human vaccine to market as quickly as possible.

“Given the urgent global need for a human coronavirus vaccine, we are doing everything we can to accelerate development,” MIGAL CEO David Zigdon said. The vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days,” he said.

It will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public, Zigdon said.

“We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite completion of final-product development and regulatory activities,” he said.

 

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