No, U.S. Sanctions Are Not the Reason for Iran’s Coronavirus Crisis https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2020/03/no-u-s-sanctions-are-not-the-reason-for-irans-coronavirus-crisis/

March 20, 2020 | David Adesnik and Saeed Ghasseminejad
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Due to the ayatollahs’ gross mismanagement, COVID-19 has taken a particularly harsh toll on the Islamic Republic. Tehran’s propagandists, however, have claimed that U.S. sanctions have hamstrung the country’s ability to fight the disease and to obtain the necessary medical supplies for the task—an argument echoed in the American media and by former Obama-administration officials. But this is nonsense, write David Adesnik and Saeed Ghasseminejad:

During the first full year after the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions [in 2018], total EU exports to Iran fell by nearly half, while pharmaceutical exports fell by just over 5 percent. Despite assertions that U.S. sanctions have worsened the coronavirus epidemic in Iran, the data do not indicate that Iran has had difficulty maintaining its imports of pharmaceuticals.

As required by law, U.S. sanctions on Iran have never prohibited trade in food, medicine, or other humanitarian goods. . . . While acknowledging that [this is the case, some] media reports allege that Western firms’ fear of sanctions create a “chilling effect” that creates an aversion even to legitimate transactions. Despite anecdotal evidence of such concerns, the official data provide a very different picture.

[Even] the single-digit decline in Iranian pharmaceutical purchases in 2019 may just be noise in the data with no relationship to the return of sanctions. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury Department has partnered with the Swiss government to open a special channel for humanitarian trade with Iran, which may help avert a potential decline in licit commerce. At the end of January, the U.S. and Swiss governments announced the completion of the first transactions through the special channel, consisting of 2.3 million euros of cancer and transplant drugs.

Of course, one might object that even if Tehran can still obtain medical supplies, sanctions have so depleted its public coffers that it cannot properly muster the necessary public-health response. But even if this were true, Iran could shore up its financial situation by ceasing to spend millions of dollars developing nuclear weapons, funding terrorist groups and militias, and building rockets to shoot at American soldiers.

Read more on FDD: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2020/03/10/trade-data-shows-sanctions-have-little-impact-on-iranian-pharma-imports/