Khamenei defends information about Corona | Deputy Speaker of Parliament: We have taken Corona as a joke!

While a number of members of parliament have questioned the statistics of coronavirus infections and deaths in Iran, the Leader of the Islamic Republic called the information about the coronavirus in Iran "honest and transparent."

Masoud Pezhakian, Vice Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly and former Minister of Health of Iran, told Ensaf News on Tuesday, March 4, that Islami does not consider the number of people infected with the coronavirus in Iran to be real and says that the number of infected people is much higher than what the Ministry of Health announces.

He said that the coronavirus was taken as a joke in Iran and that the city of Qom should have been quarantined from day one.

Explaining the unreality of the statistics, the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament said that hospitals do not have statistics at all because they have not tested all suspected people. For example, they have not tested the family of the infected person, so the number of infected people must be much higher than the announced figure.

Earlier, the Rasht MP in parliament had called the death toll from the Ministry of Health "something like a joke" and described the situation in Gilan as dire.

Gholamali Jafarzadeh, a representative from Rasht, said in parliament on Sunday that due to the lack of testing kits and late diagnosis of people infected with the coronavirus, no one has accurate information about the exact number of people infected and those who have died from the disease. However, based on the evidence and information that has reached us, the number of people infected and those who have died from the disease is higher than the figure that is being announced.

He also criticized the "positions taken by the authorities," saying that those positions "caused people not to take the issue seriously, and some of them even went on trips, and only about 700,000 people traveled to Gilan in the past few days."

The MP criticized the lack of adequate facilities in hospitals in Gilan province and said that Razi Hospital, which was intended as the main center for accepting coronavirus patients in Gilan, has written that they are not accepting new patients because their capacity is full.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, on Tuesday praised the information provided by Islamic Republic officials about the coronavirus in Iran as honest and transparent, and said that some other countries where the disease is more severe are concealing the truth.

This is while many believe that the information about the coronavirus infection in Iran was released late due to the coincidence with the elections for the Islamic Consultative Assembly, and therefore, the infection quickly became a pandemic.

On Friday, March 29, in a meeting of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike Pompeo said, considering the history of concealment by Islamic Republic officials, that the Iranian regime is reluctant to provide information about the spread of the coronavirus, and I am concerned that they may have hidden important information.

This is the second time that the US Secretary of State has expressed concern about possible cover-up by Iranian officials. Mike Pompeo warned last week that the US was concerned about the Islamic Republic's authorities' cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak.

The United States announced on Thursday that it has granted waivers from sanctions on Iran, allowing Iran's central bank to make financial transfers to send certain humanitarian services.

Source: Voice of America